Vol. 26 / No. 1 / April 2018 Volume 26 Number 1 April 2018 Lisa Outar, Editor in Charge

Published by the Departments of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies CREDITS Original image: Expulsion 2 by Portia Subran Lisa LaFramboise (copy editor) (graphic designer)

JWIL is published with the financial support of the Departments of Literatures in English of The University of the West Indies

Enquiries should be sent to THE EDITORS Journal of West Indian Literature Department of Literatures in English, UWI Mona Kingston 7, , W.I. Tel. (876) 927-2217; Fax (876) 970-4232 e-mail: [email protected]

OR

Ms. Angela Trotman Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature Faculty of Humanities, UWI Cave Hill Campus P.O. Box 64, Bridgetown, , W.I. e-mail: [email protected]

SUBSCRIPTION RATE US$20 per annum (two issues) or US$10 per issue Copyright © 2017 Journal of West Indian Literature ISSN (online): 2414-3030 EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Evelyn O’Callaghan (Editor in Chief) Michael A. Bucknor (Senior Editor) Lisa Outar (Senior Editor) Glyne Griffith Rachel L. Mordecai Kevin Adonis Browne

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Antonia MacDonald

EDITORIAL BOARD Edward Baugh Victor Chang Alison Donnell Mark McWatt Maureen Warner-Lewis

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Laurence A. Breiner Rhonda Cobham-Sander Daniel Coleman Anne Collett Raphael Dalleo Denise deCaires Narain Curdella Forbes Aaron Kamugisha Geraldine Skeete Faith Smith Emily Taylor THE JOURNAL OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE has been published twice-yearly by the Departments of Literatures in English of the University of the West Indies since October 1986. Edited by full time academics and with minimal funding or institutional support, JWIL originated at the same time as the first annual conference on West Indian Literature, the brainchild of Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris and Mark McWatt. It reflects the continued commitment of those who followed their lead to provide a forum in the region for the dissemination and discussion of our literary culture. Initially featuring contributions from scholars in the West Indies, it has become an internationally recognized peer-reviewed academic journal. The Editors invite the submission of articles in English that are the result of scholarly research in literary textuality (fiction, prose, drama, film, theory and criticism) of the English-speaking . We also welcome comparative assessments of non- Anglophone Caribbean texts provided translations into English of the relevant parts of such texts are incorporated into the submission. JWIL will also publish book reviews. Submission guidelines are available at www.jwilonline.org. Table of Contents Editorial Preface 7 Lisa Outar “The Anger of Very, Very Restless Spirits”: Plantation Arrivals, 10 Diasporic Departures and Other Queer Narratives of Caribbean Becoming—A Conversation with Faizal Deen Ronald Cummings and Nalini Mohabir

Queering : Disrupting Heteronormative Paradigms of 25 Indo-Caribbean Epistemology Suzanne C. Persard

“I Am Not What You Think”: Sexual Fetishism in Patricia Powell’s 38 The Pagoda Tuli Chatterji

From Bastardness and Outsideness to Land/(E)/Scape in The Pirate’s 53 Daughter Candice A. Pitts

The Haves and Have-Nots: Class, Globalization and Human Rights in 70 Diana McCaulay’s Dog-Heart Robin Brooks

Book reviews

Malachi McIntosh, Beyond Calypso: Rereading Samuel Selvon. 93 Simone A. James Alexander

Glyne A. Griffith, The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean 99 Literature, 1943–1958. Cornel Bogle

102 Notes on contributors 7

Editorial Preface Lisa Outar

I am very pleased to present this April 2018 issue of JWIL to you. We examine here a rich cross section of the writers, themes, genres and preoccupations that mark contemporary Caribbean cultural production. Ranging from the work of Faizal Deen, Patricia Powell, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, Diana McCaulay and queer feminist chutney songs, the pieces published here engage with themes of migration, feminist genealogies, fetishism, class tensions, human rights, exclusionary nationalism, marronage, queerness, globalization and legacies of indentureship and slavery. The first three pieces constitute an exciting nexus of theories on the conditions and implications for queer cultural production in the region and its diasporas, pushing us to engage with new paradigms for thinking about Caribbean genders and queerness in their many forms. It has been a historic time for sexuality rights in the Anglophone Caribbean given the recent decision on 12 April 2018 by the Trinidad High Court to strike down colonial era “buggery” laws as “unconstitutional, illegal, null, void, invalid and of no effect to the extent that these laws criminalise any acts constituting consensual sexual conduct between adults.” It remains to be seen whether the ruling will be held up under appeal, but we have come a far way when, as we saw in Trinidad, both heterosexual and same-sex loving people could be united in their efforts to keep governments from legislating what happens in the privacy of adult bedrooms. The continuing conflation however of same- sex desire and queer identities more generally with pedophilia in public discourse and continuing discrimination and persecution despite new legal standing makes clear the hard work that remains to be done to achieve true justice and equal rights for those who do not conform to hard-held gender and sexual norms. The conversation between poet Faizal Deen, Ronald Cummings and Nalini Mohabir and the essays by Suzanne C. Persard on queer and Tuli Chatterji on Patricia Powell’s gender crossing character, Lowe/Lau A-yin, all illuminate the complex place of queerness in Caribbean societies, each in their own way forcefully making an argument that queerness was always already existing in Caribbean cultural expressions and histories rather than being some new non- local, trendy stance imported from the Global North. As Deen argues in his wide-ranging interview with Cummings and Mohabir, “[W]hen people talk about the queer Caribbean, people don’t talk about the ways in which the Caribbean has always been queer or the ways in which decolonization and Caribbean responses to colonization have always been queer because they were always working against the normative. So I am thinking of queer in a much wider sense than sexual difference.” We are particularly pleased to offer this sustained dialogue on Deen’s work and hope it will lead to greater scholarly engagement with his fiction and theorizings of boyhood, history, nation and “palimpsestic violence.” 8

Suzanne C. Persard’s essay on chutney pushes into new arenas for intervention in existing paradigms of Indo-Caribbean scholarship, challenging what she sees as a dominant heteronormativity in approaches to the field and offering queer, feminist chutney as a site for thinking through Caribbean configurations of gender and sexuality and for pushing back against repressive policings of Indo-Caribbean female bodies and desires. Tuli Chatterji’s essay illuminates the prescient qualities of Patricia Powell’s imaginative work in The Pagoda, focusing as she does on a performatively queer body that cannot be pressed into any settled narrative of sexual or gendered identity. Reading the character of Lowe/Lau A-yin through a complex lens of locally specific Caribbean feminist and psychoanalytic theories, Chatterji makes clear the visionary contribution that Powell offered twenty years ago for imagining progressive landscapes of race, difference, gender, sexuality and belonging in the Caribbean. Questions of belonging are central to Candice A. Pitts’ examination of Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s novel, The Pirate’s Daughter. Pitts traces the multiple versions of illegitimacy and outsider status that appear in the novel in order to show Cezair- Thompson’s indictment of exclusionary practices of Jamaican nationalism. The essay corrects for the sparse scholarly attention that has been paid to this novel which, as one reviewer notes, “offers a radically new, feminist, intersectional, and environmentalist perspective on Jamaican history in the critical decades, from 1940s to the 1970s, the period of transition from colony to nation.” Continuing the focus on the impact of Jamaican fiction, Robin Brooks’ essay explores questions of literature’s role in intervening in contemporary and historical injustices. Her analysis of Diana McCaulay’s novel Dog-Heart assesses the ways in which the author uses a cross-class relationship to challenge the perpetuation of human rights violations in contemporary Jamaican society. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that includes examination of various policy documents on human rights, Brooks argues for literature being used as a tool in human rights advocacy. The two book reviews in this issue point our attention to new scholarly work that re- examines foundational moments and figures in Caribbean literary history. Simone A. James Alexander reviews Malachi McIntosh’s edited collection Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon. Alexander elucidates how the collection’s various contributors revisit Selvon’s legacy and oeuvre to direct attention to the lesser discussed of his writings (which cross multiple genres) and to challenge conventions in approaches to his work. Cornel Bogle reviews JWIL’s own Glyne Griffith’s The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958. We note our support and celebration of this publication, years of research for which had to be painfully recreated after a fire at Griffith’s home. Bogle explores the specific ways in which Griffith contributes to our understandings of the role of the BBC radio program, Caribbean Voices, in the building of West Indian literary communities. These two reviewed texts’ examination of Windrush era writers connect poignantly to the issue’s larger themes of belonging and legitimacy as we witness in this current moment the shameful and deliberate disenfranchisement and revoking of citizenship of Windrush era migrants to the United Kingdom and the rippling effects on their descendants. 9

As we think about the past (literary and historical) we would like to draw attention to and warmly welcome two new sites for dissemination of Caribbean literature and intellectual exchange. April 2018 witnessed the launch of Pree: Caribbean. Writing. which is an online platform featuring contemporary writing from the Caribbean (preelit.com). To be published twice a year, Pree offers a rigorous and prestigious site of publication and will feature original works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, interviews and experimental writing. We are also happy to witness the launch of the Leverhulme Trust funded project on Caribbean Literary Heritage (caribbeanliteraryheritage.com). Alison Donnell describes the project as invested in “raising awareness of and engagement with Caribbean literary archives – both looking back to recover papers that might be invisible today, and looking forward to preserving the future of the region’s literary past.” We have included this project in our own website’s offerings of links to Caribbean archival resources and encourage you, dear reader, to join in the collective task of building, preserving and engaging archives that trace the development and histories of Caribbean literary and cultural expressions. We congratulate Pree’s Editor-in-Chief Annie Paul and her team and Alison Donnell and hers on these exciting new ventures. Finally, I thank Portia Subran for sharing her stunning artwork, “Expulsion 2”, for our cover. A Trinidadian illustrator and mixed-media artist, Subran is also a fiction writer whose work is part of a compelling new generation of Caribbean writing. As we highlight the talents of the newest Caribbean cultural producers, we also take the time to acknowledge and mourn the passing this year of some giants of Caribbean letters. The legacies of the Guyanese Wilson Harris (1921-2018) and the St. Lucian Garth St. Omer (1931-2018) are inextricably braided into any conversations about Caribbean literature and culture that we may have on these pages. We remain grateful for the literary gifts that they have left behind and for those offered by the Jamaican writer, Garfield Ellis, who died prematurely in March 2018. We invite questions, comments, feedback to us or the authors at [email protected]. 10

“The Anger of Very, Very Restless Spirits”: Plantation Arrivals, Diasporic Departures and Other Queer Narratives of Caribbean Becoming—A Conversation with Faizal Deen Ronald Cummings and Nalini Mohabir

Source: amazon.com, Book cover for The Greatest Film by Faizal Deen.

Faizal Deen is the author of two collections of poetry, Land without Chocolate and The Greatest Films. His work has also appeared in the Journal of West Indian Literature, Postcolonial Text, and Caribbean Studies. Born in , and having migrated to as a child, the poetics of Deen’s life offers (to borrow his metaphor) “a view from the windowsill” into Guyana’s tumultuous past, asking us to engage with the complications of an unsettled and restless history (Land without Chocolate 38). In his writing, this past is often recalled through the memories, imagination and voice of the figure of the child. This recurring presence and perspective (i.e., of a child of the times) offers a unique insight into these histories that refuses a prescriptive sensibility of judgement or a particular articulation of chronological 11 progress or development. In other words, the present operates as the primary ground of experience, and this provides a emotional intensity, clarity or perhaps honesty to his work. While Deen’s choice of this narrative voice situates him in conversation with a previous generation of nationalist writers who drew on the Bildungsroman (a form that parallels the growth of the nation with that of the childhood speaker or protagonist) to inscribe the development of a postcolonial consciousness, Deen’s insistence on an engagement with the experiential, emotional and cognitive perspective of the child refuses straightforward, teleological developmental trajectories. As he suggests here, he writes a queer childhood, one that allows us to engage perhaps with ideas of “growing sideways” (Stockton) as one reality of postcolonial un/development and that renders postcolonial temporalities as queer, cyclical and restless, where we must grapple with frustrated desires and dreams. Although his perspective is broadly pan-Caribbean, the space of Guyana and its histories is most often evoked in Deen’s work. The recent history of Guyana is a narrative of tragedies, beginning with the struggle for independence. In 1953, the anti-colonial, Marxist leader Cheddi Jagan sailed to electoral victory with widespread support across the country’s racial lines, worrying a small but influential middle class. Four months later, Queen Elizabeth sent British troops to depose his government. Shortly thereafter, the Guyanese political leadership split into primarily African-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese factions. For many anti-colonial movements across the global south, Marxism was an alternative to Western modernity defined by exploitative imperial capitalism. Working-class Indo-Guyanese, however, did not necessarily support Marxist politics; nonetheless, they supported Jagan. African-Guyanese primarily supported his rival, Forbes Burnham. Suspicious of Jagan’s strident Marxist rhetoric, the CIA undermined his leadership by covertly spurring racialized violence and political machinations leading to Burnham’s election victory in 1966 (Rabe). Although viewed as a more moderate leader by Western powers, Burnham’s government became increasingly authoritarian. To consolidate power in the 1970s, voting lists were manipulated, and civil liberties and media freedom were suppressed. Policies including bans on food imports, the nationalization of sugar and bauxite industries, and required paramilitary service allowed Burnham to portray a radical left image; however, the repression of dissent belied the claim.1 A flight of capital and people ensued. Walter Rodney, the pan-Africanist Marxist historian, returned to Guyana in 1974 and entered into Guyanese politics as a member of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), an alternative political party. Rodney’s sharp anti-racist Marxist politics and analysis galvanized protests against the Burnham regime across racial divides. Despite the state-cultivated climate of fear, growing interracial support for the WPA represented a serious threat to Burnham’s leadership. State violence spiked, resulting in the killing of Father Darke (a Jesuit priest attempting to photograph a demonstration), the mysterious death of Vincent Teekah (a cabinet minister in Burnham’s government, whose death is still rumoured to be an “inside job”), and the assassination of Walter Rodney in 1980, among others. During this period, Guyana experienced large-scale out-migration (an alternative form of protest, i.e., voting with one’s feet), resulting in roughly the same number of Guyanese living outside the country as within. However, the course of Guyanese electoral politics changed in the years after Burnham’s death in 1985. His successor, Desmond Hoyte, restored democratic elections in 1992 (under the encouragement of the United States), and Jagan returned to power after three decades in opposition. His election triggered a wave of return migration among those whose bodies had migrated, but whose dreams never left. Yet the dream was elusive. Guyana remains mired in a crisis of ethno-political divides and continuing flights of passage. Perhaps more than other Anglophone Caribbean migrations, the word “diaspora,” attendant to longing and exile, shapes Guyanese identity in the north. 12

While such circumstances propelled Deen’s family migration, his personal life is part of a longer imperial chain of events in the Americas. An earlier generation of Caribbean writers, who were taught by the colonial education system to look northwards, resisted becoming part of a continuing history of catastrophe through their attention to and exaltation of local detail. Similarly, Deen is not a lost soul caught in history’s maelstrom, but neither is he fixed in place. His poems, narrated through the every day, are firmly anchored in the Guyana of his childhood, but he also queers the borders of the Caribbean to include Ottawa, his current home. Both a large scope of vision and an acute eye enliven the scales of his Caribbean diasporic imagination, refusing a fragmentation of spirit between south and north. This interview occurred in Toronto (Canada)—a meeting place for Caribbean people. More specifically, collective ancestors of this mini-pan-Caribbean gathering were imagined, remembered and invoked around a kitchen table. Ronald Cummings, born in Jamaica, is a professor of English Literature at Brock University, Ontario. Nalini Mohabir, of Trinidadian-Guyanese parentage, is a geographer based in Concordia University, Montreal. Faizal Deen is a Guyanese-Canadian poet and critic living in Ottawa.

Plantation Arrivals and Diasporic Departures RC: I want to focus on the question of history because it’s so present in your books. I read your work as part of what I think of as a shift in Caribbean writing. It is a move away from an epic sensibility evident in a text like The Arrivants. In your work, there is something nuanced in the attention to the quotidian. There are small gestures that constitute the writing of histories in both your books, but these gestures are also set against the backdrop of specific historical moments that are monumental in the making of Guyana and its diasporas. In reading Land without Chocolate, for instance, there is a way in which the 1970s is present in the very titles of some of these poems. How does history, at these different scales, inform your writing? NM: Also, in your second collection, The Greatest Films, there is a way in which your ideas of elaborations and misremberings speak to the Guyanese diaspora living within moments of silence punctuated by violence and death, in those particular moments of the 1960s or later the murders of Vincent Teekah or Walter Rodney, when certain cycles of violence amplify the silences. I am also wondering how not just ordinary silence, but silences in the political making of Guyana shape your poetics. FD: So to bring both your observations into play and to comment on the questions about history in the book, in my mind, Guyana is already a place of palimpsests. It’s a place of palimpsestic violence. So by the time we arrive in a place like Guyana, the interior and the coast have already witnessed the marginalization and the supplantation of Amerindian populations, but more directly the genocidal activities of the sugar slave plantations. We arrive on Plantations to be housed in barracks that are already rankled by what I can only conceptualize as the anger of very, very restless spirits. So, when you encounter a poem like Mahadai Das’s “They Came in Ships”, the beauty of Das’s poem is to acknowledge that the coolie—the East Indian—arrives already into “a womb of space,” to borrow Wilson Harris’s term, that is already haunted by acts of historical violence for which we have not found any kind of corrective measure or any imaginative gesture of healing. So you are already arriving in a historical lineage of catastrophe.2 Now what does that mean for the 1970s? My childhood or my 13 boyhood poetic speakers in these books are really responding to the unfinished or incomplete histories of decolonization that are the inheritance of the 1970s. Independence and the promise of national sovereignty give way to various disappointments that are the result of (and we can be very blunt about this) the presence of Guyana within the politics of the Cold War. This includes the behind-the- scenes activities and ministrations of the CIA in propping up the Burnham regime, the fortification of peripheral elites who were in support of the interests of the Americans, and, to me, all of this speaks to this antagonistic and agonistic process of decolonization and how small countries—small in terms of hegemonic power or currency—battle or struggle for avenues out of various states of peril (economic peril, socio-economic peril, political peril, cultural peril)—after having already endured centuries of this palimpsestic violence. So there are many ways to respond to this. One way is silence. Many people left. People of all races, all classes, all occupations, all ethnicities left. We left as economic refugees. We left as political refugees. We left and when we arrived in places like Toronto, Ottawa, Orleans, we never talked about it. We never talked about why we left. No one told their children what was at stake. We just knew we had to leave. So how do you account then as children for these decisions that adults make and that your parents make for you? Well, you use the paradigms that are available to you as children. And those are the paradigms that come from playtime, paradigms that come from storybooks, movies, comic books, or Carnival, paradigms of horror that come from the folklore and the stories that you consume or inherit from your childhood in Guyana. In my second book, The Greatest Films, the soucouyant or the Ol’ Higue3 is actually serving the same function as the Nazis at the end of The Sound of Music or the Nazi presence in Cabaret. Let me tell you what I mean by that. These represent processes of zombification. They are processes of historical movements that result in the erasure of your very corporeal presence— the extermination of bodies. I have also encountered work that has been done in relation to this idea of the missing body or the imperiled body vis-à-vis certain Jamaican folklores or ghost stories. These stories allowed us to understand what it meant to be part of histories that didn’t envision our very survival. Imperial histories were not predicated on us sitting here around this table having this conversation. They were zero-future histories. That’s what I think of when I think of Slavery, of Indentureship, of Apprenticeship and the agonies of the Crown Colony period and then the postcolony, the atomic age and the Cold War age, the ways in which the Caribbean was caught between the Soviet Union and the United States. None of this is about the survival of our bodies. So when you encounter the Ol’ Higue in Guyana that actually sucks the blood of your children, that’s a state of emergency that recalls the very real memory of not surviving the Plantation and of never surviving the interior. We went to the movies a lot in the 1970s because it was one of the only places where, as a family, you could have some entertainment, alongside walks in the National Park or the Botanical Gardens in Georgetown. When we encounter the Nazis at the end of The Sound of Music or the Hollywood versions of Exodus or stories of people who are expelled from places—the Orientalist versions of these movements—what we did in our minds, we repurposed these stories to account for our own historical predicament, and that is the most succinct way I can respond to both of your observations and questions in relation to these books. RC: What was leaving Guyana like, and how is that narrative retold in your work? Does it take on some of the elements of “misrememberings” and “elaborations” in relation to stories of indentured arrival? How is that moment of diasporic flight related to these histories of displacement that you outline? Also, how does that experience fit within your conceptualization of super-syncretic diasporas? 14

FD: When we were leaving Guyana as Indo-Caribbean children, we actually did think of ourselves as Jews and that’s a fact in my family. We thought of ourselves as Jews trying to find an escape route. What I am saying is that, imaginatively, we were already super-syncretic. We were leaving as Indo- and specifically as a multi-racial, multi-ethnic family—a family that embraced several religions but also embraced Marxism and modernity. The adults in my family were leaving with those imaginations. They were leaving with the memories of the disappointments of the 1950s in Guyana. They were leaving with the disappointments but also the hopes and dreams that one day people like Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney would reassume a political leadership and a historical presence in the future of Guyana that had been circumvented or basically frozen by the incursion of a CIA-backed dictatorship. So when remigration happened in the early 1990s, it was very strange. People who were returning from my family or from our wider group of friends and family, in my recollection, it was almost like they were returning in such a way that the moment—let’s say from 1968 to 1988—those two decades had never happened. RC: The zones of flight are interesting as well. One of the things that strikes me is that when we think about Caribbean-Canadian writing, it is often very Toronto-centred. FD: I am very ambivalent about the Toronto-centric significances of Caribbean-Canadian writing and spaces. I tend to cherish Caribbean-Canadian spaces that are not centred in Toronto. So the poetry of Claire Harris has been very important to me.4 Cyril Dabydeen’s poetry is also important to me because his work paves the way for other Ottawa-based Guyanese Caribbean poets to enact a poetics.5 I feel as if I am trying my best to talk about the ways in which the presence of Caribbeanness comes to bear on the urban spaces of Ottawa and Montreal. One of the things that I found in my research is that Edgar Mittelholzer had spent some time in Montreal and that’s why Mittelholzer shows up in The Greatest Films. Mittelholzer was paralyzed by race and his internalization of his own racism, which is part of the colonial condition. His paralysis, however, manifests itself in a particular historical sense. To me, he reads his racial admixture through what resembles the ideas and ideologies of Nazism. Mittelholzer holds on quite strongly to his German Swiss ancestry and, if you encounter his images of Blackness, especially in his gothic work like My Bones and My Flute, what is at stake in his work is the restoration of the white plantation master and the European antecedent or ancestor. The charge of that restoration or recuperation is given to the douglarized (African-Asian) family or subject in the Guyanese sociocultural and racial landscape. So I find it very peculiar that this man (I can’t make any biographical claims but judge from the work itself), is so paralyzed and distraught by racial admixture and internalized racism that it leads to a very certain madness or mental schism. And I find it interesting that he made it to Montreal and attempted to write one of his novels there. I decided to resurrect him in relation to this sense of what it meant to escape Guyana and to end up in a place such as Montreal in a neighbourhood populated by Jews who all had stories of what it meant to escape from Europe.6 I found Mittelholzer to be a kind of glue that held both of those stories of escape together. I seek him out as a glue to hold these parallel stories of global historical incidents of East Indian and Jewish expulsion—these stories of escape—together. RC: The relationship between leaving and returning is one that is also there in your poetry. I am thinking about your Cowan Street poems in Land without Chocolate where the grandmother standing at the gate is this figure who embodies this tension between leaving and returning.7 There is also “What the Lord Said”—another Cowan street poem which is subtitled “a homecoming.” I am interested in your treatment of this relationship between leaving and returning, and how both of those manifest as relational coordinates in your writing. 15

NM: If I could queer that as well, in Land without Chocolate’s poem “Self Portrait” you say, “the boy will call desire back to the windowsills / of tropical memory” (6-7). So in thinking about leaving and returning, there is the pulse of desire. It is not only about returning to the historical place of your childhood memory but also about queered desires of memory? FD: Let me begin with the first question. I have talked a lot about dispossession so far. Why would anyone want to return to a place of dispossession? Why would anyone want to return to a place where there is no chocolate? But the irony implicit in the title is that Guyana and the continent, of course, is the land of chocolate. Historically, it is the bearer of chocolate. It is the bearer of sweetness and addictions and pleasures for the European: the overseer, the master, the mistress. But by the time you get to my poems, it has become something that belongs to us. So we are the ones who now inhabit the Victorian Gothic of the architecture of Georgetown. We are the ones who inhabit the villages in ways that are still often determined and circumscribed by the violence of globalization and the violence of the early struggle for independence. Yet there are lives and pleasures and happinesses, the small moments that we have spoken of in terms of what happens in kitchens and living rooms and what happens around radios and in movie theatres and in parks. And what happens at Easter, Diwali, Eid and Mashramani, and what happens when we as a syncretic people make histories out of histories that were designed to eliminate us. There is no nice way of putting this. No one can say “yes but” when you talk about violence in the Caribbean. I can’t see imperial histories as anything other than histories that were predicated to eliminate us. I can’t see imperial histories as anything but a final solution. What does it mean then to make something so powerful out of these histories so that when you leave, you have never left? When you arrive in a place like Ottawa at the beginning of winter in 1977 in the twilight of the Trudeau era?8 I like to call it the fag end of Trudeau, which is a queering of Trudeau when he pops up in the poems.9 I am queering Trudeau because he was also, in some circles, known as a man of sexual ambiguity. That’s how he was discussed in some social circles. Now, I am not just being a purveyor of gossip here; Trudeau’s ambiguity was something that was very much part of his charisma and attraction for some Guyanese people, especially in the urban areas. So we arrive in Canada in the fag ends of the Trudeau years. But we are encamped in Canada. We are not multicultural. We are not assimilated as of yet. My mother died in Canada. I don’t think she was ever an assimilated subject. So what does it mean then to leave but to never leave? Your body is physically away but every other part of your being is yearning for that windowsill, a place where there is very little demarcation between inside and outside. Once we arrive in Canada in winter, windows are shut. Doors are closed. So, environmentally, you are reminded of all the ways in which psychically you have not left Guyana. You are still six years old and you are half-naked, running up and down Cowan Street. You are still that person even though you are trying to play baseball in Ottawa. Your winter coat feels like a space suit. You are always writing back home. There are letters in The Greatest Films. Letter writing was a huge part of never leaving. When you wrote letters to the grandparents and to loved ones, you were actually writing your body and your psyche and yourself. You were giving a little piece of yourself and sending it back home as evidence. Leaving and arriving are central characters in these books, and it is very difficult to, in a definitive sense, pinpoint what the affect is in both of these points and how they cease to be points that can be located. So the real border then, in Land without Chocolate, is not the national boundary that separates British Guiana or Guyana from any other place or the entry or departure from what was Timehri airport but is now Cheddi Jagan airport. The point I am trying to make in the poem “Cowan Street (a 16 confession)” is that the gate is the border, the yard is the nation. The family home is the nation. Guyana is the family home. And remember I am not theorizing from the point of view of scholarship or the point of view of adultness—the way we do as cultural workers in the university and in intellectual life—I am talking about the memories of these children. That gate is the one I see before me right now as I am speaking to you. In fact, we are inside of the gate as we speak. That’s the gesture. So to go beyond the gate opens up another kind of conversation. But for the world of the child, the grandmother at the gate is a stand-in for the customs officer at an airport. It’s a different kind of entry. It’s a different kind of exit. It’s a different kind of arrival and it’s a different kind of leaving. Those were some of the negotiations and some of the feeling happening in some of those poems. And all of that plays into the windowsill yearning—to collapse the inside and the outside. You get to talk about a boyhood that might appear as fantasy to the Western reader. It appears as exotic, but I actually drew that boyhood from my own. There were macaws in the yard. There were sakiwinki monkeys. There were dogs and cats, and they were all commissioned to perform and reperform the historical stories that I heard the adults talking about, which included whatever political events were occurring that we didn’t understand because that was “big people talk.” So you and the animals and toys would perform and replay all of this stuff that was happening in the 1970s in Guyana—the bombings, kidnappings, violence, the instability. The fact that you could not go beyond the gate, for whatever reason, these are the responses of children to what was happening outside and beyond. That’s sort of what I was trying to do in a general sense with Land without Chocolate and what I am doing in a more particular, specific way in The Greatest Films. NM: Can you talk more about the similarities and differences between these poetry collections? FD: The Greatest Films is actually more about Guyana in Canada or the Caribbean in Canada. In Land without Chocolate, there is more unity. There is a greater sense of a more unified subject, anchored in a sense of self and in a sense of cultural identity, as well as a sense of wholeness. Whereas, once you get to The Greatest Films, there are fractures. You have a splitting apart. We live in an age where to talk about diaspora as madness or diaspora as mental illness gets us in a lot of trouble as people feel like you are appropriating mental illness or illness as metaphor vis-à-vis Susan Sontag and other writers. I completely understand that, but for me, the way in which diaspora is being lived in my second book, The Greatest Films, there is always the precarity of mental or psychological misadventure. You have to be able to hold all of this fragmentation and do something with it. You have to find that join. I am not sure what the third book is going to be. I am not sure what will be reassembled out of these two books once the speaker moves into late adolescence or early adulthood, but I really believe that the structure and the form of The Greatest Films is not premeditated. It was not positioned specifically to speak to any kind of disjunctive poetic practice that is fashionable right now in the poetry marketplace. It came out like that. It came out because I wanted to do things with the page. I wanted the page to look like the mind. I wanted the page to reflect what it means that wherever I go in the world as a poet and thinker, I am also returned to the Caribbean whether that Caribbean is real or imagined or a fantasy or not, or a construct of my own auto-Orientalism, or whether I have repurposed purposefully, whether I have misrepresented, whether it is threaded through Canada. I like to think of The Greatest Films as a collection of poetic threadings. What is at stake here is a certain psychic, emotional and mental response to being split all different ways by a succession of arrivals and departures that go all the way back for centuries, that go all the way back to the hauntings of those ghosts in those palimpsestic histories of catastrophe in the Caribbean. 17

NM: I want to return to the geographies you emphasized in speaking of arrivals and departures. Seeing it from a child’s eye, the space of arrival might be a very small space—somebody’s living room, arriving in the yard, the family home, but the space of departure is the vast openness of the sea beyond towards London, Toronto, New York or Miami, or other places of migrant sensibilities. Could you speak to that? FD: In terms of looking to the coast, the sea wall is a really profound physical and psychic marker and space. It is a place of social gathering and walks after dinner, of liming, of desire and romance, moonlight, ice cream, snowcones. Right near the seawall is, of course, National Park, so you can look to National Park and you will see the kites flying. So again, it’s an absence of a certain kind of demarcation between inside and outside, and yet it’s a very strict demarcation between land and ocean. In terms of what lies beyond the sea wall, it was never immediately New York or Toronto. If it were any place in the Global North in the time of my poems and Guyana in the global sixties and seventies—it would have been London—another island. What was more immediate than London was Barbados and Trinidad as an escape to a place that we imagined, during the more turbulent years of the 1970s, as a place of more opportunities and of political and economic stability that was still part of the Caribbean. It felt more accessible and more possible than actually going as far as London at that time. Remember that in the 1970s it wasn’t easy to leave Guyana. It was a very long process. Similar things were happening in Jamaica at that time. So if you had some sort of Trinidadian connection, if you had a father who was Trinidadian like the biological father in Land without Chocolate or The Greatest Films (not the adopted father), you did everything you could to get your children the Trinidadian passport so they could escape national military service in Guyana. Especially if you were of a certain background, class or political affiliation, or if you had in any way crossed the government regime, you would try to get your children out to university in Trinidad. The most affordable and accessible vacation holiday in those days was Barbados. Many Guyanese newlyweds would go to Barbados for their honeymoon. So before Barbados became a honeymoon destination for white people, it was actually a honeymoon destination for Caribbean people. These are the kinds of things that I want more people to talk about and not to think of certain countries in the Caribbean specifically through their transactions with the Global North. Those are some of the desires that are locked into the movement from the yard and the space of the family home on Cowan Street to the sea wall. It’s the dreaming that one would carry inside of them as they walked or drove from their home to the sea wall. But there is also another movement and it’s the movement into the interior. So there is a reclamation of the interior as a place of holiday or a Sunday getaway. There is the movement from the city, which is named and mapped and known, to various creeks in the interior. The creek that comes up in my poems is Madawini Creek, and it becomes a delightful, exotic space. It’s much deeper than an exotification. It’s a renegotiation of what Walter Raleigh would have thought of the creeks and the interior. But it’s certainly a place that becomes the backdrop for much of the childhood fantastical imaginings. Madawini Creek is an interesting place because the proprietor of Madawini Creek was a man called Frenchie who was a white Frenchman. He had escaped from Devil’s Island10 off the coast of French Guiana into the interior of British Guiana and was basically an undocumented escaped convict, and his daughter would visit him from France from time to time. There is another example of a super-syncretic diasporic negotiation and, in that transaction, you have a car full of mixed-race cousins travelling into the interior to this creek that’s run by this French man whose entry into British Guyana is routed through spaces whose histories are the other Guianas. 18

Other Queer Narratives of Caribbean Becoming RC: I am glad you both mentioned boyhood as essential to understanding these texts. It’s one of the unifying presences that brings Land without Chocolate and The Greatest Films together. Boyhood emerges as a kind of articulated and articulate narrative position in both your works. How does boyhood as narrative perspective and as a narrative voice disrupt particular teleologies and trajectories? How is this idea of boyhood for you linked to discourses and processes of becoming? How does boyhood also function as a space of possibility? Of course, part of that possibility includes different paths and becoming something different than expected. This idea of becoming in some ways, I would argue, constitutes another thread in both your books. FD: Boyhood is my queer device. Let’s be honest about it. Boyhood is already a condition that is queer or that is being actively queered. Boyhood is a queer space even before departure. So a lot of the queer Caribbean literature that is studied in universities right now, at least the literature that I have encountered on various syllabi, is always written from away or tends to be written from the safe space of away. What boyhood does, in both Land without Chocolate and The Greatest Films, is that it becomes spaces of double and triple consciousness. It becomes a space of gender transition and of gender queerness that is not defined by gender or defined by biology or by the defensive heterosexuality of procreation, especially in relation to the histories of dispossession that we have been talking about. When you have histories of Slavery and Indentureship, the child and the making of the next generation become the only way beyond the genocidal practices of these institutions. In this context, a huge onus is placed on the boy figure to assume a certain kind of masculine role whether it is strength or a certain kind of entitlement that is given, especially in an Indian household, with the end being eventual marriage and a continuation of the family and historical line and lines of memory through children and procreation, and keeping cultural and religious traditions alive, in terms of Islam, through patrilineal avenues. My fictionalized boyhoods in these poems are actually doing something quite different. There are many instances in my poems where the boy becomes a girl or, in grief or mourning, he becomes a half-girl.11 The boy figure in my poems is someone that is removed from the strictures of gender expectation and the strictures of masculine roles. They are freed so that they can become the poet and can become the seer and holder of memory. They become the writer or recorder of a long memory that includes the voices of men and women, brothers and sisters, angry ghosts and benevolent ghosts. Once we come to The Greatest Films in diaspora, the queerness of the boy becomes more complicated and problematized by histories of homophobia. Land without Chocolate addresses Caribbean homophobias whereas The Greatest Films is speaking not so much to Caribbean homophobias but to the homophobias of Judeo-Christian Western traditions. These are, of course, inherited or transmitted into the Caribbean through the ideological and spiritual arms of the colonial enterprise in the region. There are complications around the queerness of boyhood in The Greatest Films that take us into other avenues. Certainly the poems in Our Caribbean are trying to make a link between the ways in which we actually innovate white Western queer spaces with the queernesses that we already embody and perform as Caribbean subjects. Because one of the interesting things is when people talk about the queer Caribbean, people don’t talk about the ways in which the Caribbean has always been queer or the ways in which decolonization and Caribbean responses to colonization have always been queer because they were always working against the normative. So I am thinking of queer in a much wider sense than sexual difference. Again, all of these poems are fixated on the figure of the boy-child, the young man who in some way has to reckon with the spirits and legacies of fathers and grandfathers who are dead. I am coming out to the dead and that’s a different kind of coming out. That’s a coming 19 out on my own terms, and that’s actually also even saying that coming out is a Western invention and, for queer people of colour, we have to have agency around how we come out, if we choose to come out, what it means to come out in terms of a global or what Jasbir Puar has called an imperialism of queerness. The imperialism of queerness has to realize that we have a lot more at stake than our sexual identities because we are intersectional subjects. And, especially living in the diaspora, are we going to come out as queer at the expense of cultural, racial, religious and historical heartease (to quote from Lorna Goodison’s work)? Are we expected to abandon our own populations and our own communities because we are expected to come out in a way that has not been politicized or decolonized or racialized or historicized in ways that are particular to Guyana, to Barbados, Trinidad, St. Vincent, Jamaica. And when we talk about the queer Caribbean, we have to remember that this is not a monolithic queer Caribbean. These are different countries, cultures and contexts. And so part of all of these poems—the three in Our Caribbean and in these collections—are wrestling with this whole idea of what it means to come out to the ancestors, to reveal yourself to the ancestor and to let the ancestor know that you have a different path and that perhaps the queer and trans person has another role to play in history-keeping, whichever part of the Caribbean they claim. RC: We can talk more about the conversations that emerge from Our Caribbean as a text and a gathering, and also link this to the idea of the particularities of Guyanese queerness or of queer Guyaneseness. I wonder how some of this becomes articulated in your poetry through the figure of the antiman. I wondered if you wanted to say something about the particularities of that term, and about Caribbean grammars of queerness and the histories of naming and also histories of embodiment. FD: The antiman is both a negation of man but also an auntieman as in a womanish man—a man who keeps company with aunties, with women. That’s how I understood the antiman when I was growing up in the 1970s. I have noticed these days the default is the antiman but I grew up with both spellings and both ideas. There was a social and cultural space for homosexual men in the seventies Guyana in which I was a child. Of course, both are negations of patrilineage and roles of masculinity and bravado, machismo and proving your virility by having many women and making lots of children, and that kind of thing. In my book, I use the term a few times but in Land without Chocolate, I tend to fixate on this idea of the “noman.” I was playing with the idea of nomad. The noman becomes a nomad actually. The noman has no nation.12 What I am trying to say is that the figure of the antiman or the auntieman is that location or moment where you can transcend the national boundary. It dislocates the national as defined through patrilineage or the way the nation is defined through procreation. That dislocation opens up a dialectical gesture and this other space where the homosexual poet, at least in my poetic universe, becomes this seer, a witness—not an omniscient narrator but certainly a figure that can hold and embody multitudes because they are not invested in a circumscribed idea or notion of a national identity that is tied to the familial or to patrilineage. So that’s what I am playing with in both of the collections when you encounter the Guyanese antiman. If you take the idea of the auntieman, the womanish man, the man who sits with women, who gossips with women, who is possibly a trans figure or possibly gender queer or Lady antiman who shows up in The Greatest Films, who is a drag queen figure, or a trans figure like Jack and Jill (who also show up in The Greatest Films), these are more than hyphenated or hybrid identities. They are almost magical figures. Ironically, although they exist outside of patrilineage, they are also history-keeping, so they are also active in the remembering of certain cultural memories. So in my poems, like “The Magical Real” in Our Caribbean, the magical queer/real is a very ambiguous character. 20

There are a few other things that I want to say about the specificity of the antiman in relation to the buller man or the battyman.13 One of the interesting things about my five years spent living in Jamaica is that I thought a lot about the literalization that is marked in the concept of the battyman. The homosexual is configured in relation to the sexual act or presumed act of sexual desire that is sodomy, ass fucking, anal fucking, fucking that leads to no procreation, that leads to nastiness—a nasty man (which is a derivative of the batty man and is connected in the popular imagination to HIV/ AIDS, contamination, and the death of the nation as well as the body). That’s not removed from the antiman who is understood as a negation of man in the Guyanese context. It’s just a more honest, literal explication of a queer identity that can only be processed, on one level, linguistically through the sexual act. Yet, in a more complicated and important way, I really believe that there is a huge component in many Caribbean homophobias linked to histories and legacies. There is a pathology to many incarnations of Caribbean homophobia that is rooted in the reactivation of the fear of the end of the species and family, the end of bodies, that takes us back to the brutality of the plantations. I really believe that this defensive heterosexuality needs to be historicized. We cannot import Queer Nation and other models of LGBTQ activism in a wholesale kind of way. Of course we can work with LGBTQ populations globally to innovate one another and to complete the work of decolonization as Vidyaratha Kissoon in Guyana would argue.14 He has said, for instance, that the fight for LGBT rights in Guyana and, by extension, in the wider Caribbean is unfinished decolonization and I would agree with him. So we must work with LGBTQ populations globally, but you can’t in a wholesale way import the rainbow flag and gay pride parade because those have antecedents and are invested in the struggle of Stonewall and other historical and social revolutions that are particular to those places and societies, whether in America, Canada, the United Kingdom or continental Europe. We can’t just jump into a queer pride parade in Guyana. We have to address the historical wounds, scars and ruptures out of which our homophobias have emerged. So I actually believe that although the battyman is a phenomenal linguistic demarcation on so many levels (it’s a terror as well as pleasure or humour, depending on how you claim or repurpose it, if one is allowed to do so) it is not removed from the more socially embedded or entrenched resonances of the auntieman in Guyana who is also excluded from and will also be subjected to acts of brutal and horrific violence depending on where they find themselves in rural or urban landscapes. But I really believe that both are rooted in a terror that takes us back to what it means to come to the end of a familial line. RC: The complex relation between terror and intense spaces and moments of pleasure is also in your work. I am thinking about those poems in Our Caribbean and your representation of queer club spaces. I am struck by the meditation on the disco as a sort of intimate and magical space. I am interested in how your work also engages with these histories and moments of pleasure, whether captured through moments of dancing together or just the queer glances at movie screens that we see in your collections, where something else emerges. I wondered if you wanted to say something as well about how these histories of pleasure exist alongside the palimspestic histories of violence and catastrophes. How does queer life—the narratives of the antiman or the battyman—function as particular avenues for revisiting those histories? FD: Diasporically speaking, I would begin by saying that we are already prepared for the bacchanal of the queer disco and the pride parades of the West. We understand what it means to put our bodies on mass display regardless of what the reason is. So, diasporically, when the magical queers in my books go out to dance in a disco, they are going out to dance in a safe place but I don’t necessarily see that pleasure in dancing and the celebration of the body as being particularly different from cultures of dancing and collective and communal celebration that the queer Caribbean person 21 has grown up with even if they cannot participate or wouldn’t think of participating queerly, as such, in Carnival or Mashramani, because what is being celebrated is not particularly sexuality per se. It could be sexuality or the reversal of sexualities or the overturning of sexual norms. Of course all of those queernesses are part of Carnival, and Rosamond King and others have explored the queerness of Carnival.15 I always took my body and the body of the people in my stories and poems into the disco with that non-normative pleasure, that sense of reversal and bacchanal in tow. But there is something else in terms of history. I have always believed that when gay people get together, wherever they get together, these were always spaces that were being innovated by differences in class and race. This happened, no matter how hidden the gay bar or gay disco may be. The gay disco was at one point a place that was very well hidden especially in the Western world, in cities like London and New York. People knew where the gay area was or they might have known, but they were always marginalized spaces. One of the things that we don’t see a lot of, when we think about gay histories in the West, is how Blackness, working class, trans* queerness innovated the queer disco. Gay discos like Paradise Garage and The Saint come up in poems in Our Caribbean and The Greatest Films. I believe in the late 1970s, when you went out at nighttime that was queer history. You were making queer history. To enter a queer disco was to make and enact queer history, or participate in the making and performance of queer history. I believe that Caribbean people participated and continue to participate in the diaspora in the making of such spaces. Caribbean people who are in Georgetown, or Kingston, who queer spaces without the mainstream realizing that the space is also being queered by the presence of queers, are also making significant queer history. One thing I can say is that, in Georgetown in the 1970s, places like The Dog and The Bone (I think that was in the Tower Hotel) and different bars around town like the bar at the Palm Court on Main Street, whether people were aware of it or not, there were gay people there drinking and eating and celebrating and taking up space. So there are ways of queering the public sphere and of creating queer geographies that are actively being drawn and mapped as we talk today. We are waiting for someone from the Caribbean to write or to do what George Chauncey did with his book Gay New York and what other people have done with other cities around the world.16 I guess in some ways we are doing it in bits and pieces through novels, poetry, theorizations, the scholarship that’s coming out, but I feel as if we need a full-on idea of what it means to play a Mother Sally, for instance, in the Guyanese tradition, what it means for a man to walk around on stilts as a woman or in drag and to think about the queer reversals and revisions of that, and how these queer revisings speak to the history of movements through the passages—the Middle Passage and the Kala Pani for example. Certainly there is a queer investment in these performances. I tend to articulate sexual desire and physical desire sometimes alongside the recuperation of historical memory. I see this all as a genealogy. I really feel that that genealogy is big and we all have to write it together and this is my stake in writing that. NM & RC: Thank you. 22

Notes 1 Deen’s use of strike-through font and fill-in-the-blanks poetics inThe Greatest Films gestures to this time.

2 A notion of a regional history of catastrophe is elaborated in Kamau Brathwaite’s article “Metaphors of Underdevelopment: A Poem for Hernan Cortez.”

3 Ol’ Higue is a reference to Guyanese folklore, and refers to a vampire-like spirit in the form of an old woman who desires blood, similar to the soucouyant in .

4 Claire Harris is a Caribbean-Canadian poet, born in Trinidad. She won the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her collection Fables from the Women’s Quarters.

5 Cyril Dabydeen is a Guyanese poet based in Ottawa. He has been an important voice in Guyanase literature for several decades. He won the first A.J. Seymour Lyric Poetry Prize in 1967 and was Poet Laureate of Ottawa from 1984 to 1987.

6 See “WAR CRIMINALS: Escape Roots,” The Greatest Films (Deen 36).

7 See “Cowan Street (a confession),” Land without Chocolate (Deen 16).

8 Pierre Elliot Trudeau served as Canada’s prime minister from 1974 to1979, and again in the early 1980s. He was hailed by many immigrant communities at the time as a champion of multiculturalism.

9 See “BOYHOOD THINKS: Omnibus” in The Greatest Films (Deen 25).

10 Devil’s Island was a penal colony for French prisoners.

11 See, for example, “Vertigo” in Land without Chocolate (Deen 45).

12 For example, see “Overtures from the Picture Show” in Land without Chocolate (Deen 9). 23

13 For further discussion of these terms, see Timothy Chin’s article “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary Caribbean Literature” (127–41) and Wesley Crichlow, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys.

14 Vidyaratha Kissoon is an activist in Guyana, whose writings on LGBTQ rights have appeared frequently in Stabroek News letters to the editor over the last decade.

Works Cited Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford UP, 1973.

---. “Metaphors of Underdevelopment: A Poem for Hernan Cortez.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, 1985, pp. 453–76.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940. Basic Books, 1995.

Chin, Timothy. “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary Caribbean Literature.” Callaloo, vol. 20, no. 1, 1997, pp. 127–41.

Crichlow, Wesley. Buller Men and Batty Bwoys. U of Toronto P, 2004.

Das, Mahadai. “They Came in Ships.” in the Caribbean, edited by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, Hansib, 1987, pp. 288–89.

Deen, Faizal. The Greatest Films: A Poem. Mawenzi House, 2016.

---. Land without Chocolate: A Memoir. Wolsak and Wynn, 1999.

---. “Three Poems.” Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited by Thomas Glave, Duke UP, 2008, pp. 153–57.

Goodison, Lorna. Heartease, New Beacon, 1989.

Harris, Claire. Fables from the Women’s Quarters. Williams-Wallace, 1984. 24

Harris, Wilson. The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Greenwood, 1983. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies no. 73.

King, Rosamond. “New Citizens, New Sexualities: Nineteenth Century Jamettes.” Sex and the Citizen, edited by Faith Smith, U of Virginia P, 2011, pp. 214–23.

Mittelholzer, Edgar. My Bones and My Flute. Peepal Tree, 2015.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages. Duke UP, 2007.

Rabe, Stephen. U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story. U of North Carolina P, 2006.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child or Growing Sideways. Duke UP, 2009. 25

Queering Chutney: Disrupting Heteronormative Paradigms of Indo- Caribbean Epistemology Suzanne C. Persard

Source: Photo by Nadia Huggins.

Queer forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural production are far from absent, hidden or rare. From the paintings of Shalini Seereeram in Trinidad to the films of Michelle Mohabeer in Toronto, the poetry of Rajiv Mohabir, the art installations of Andil Gosine or the stages of drag queen Sundari, the Indian Goddess, in Richmond Hill, Queens, queer Indo-Caribbean cultural productions counter a discourse that locates queerness as either peripheral or exceptional to Indo-Caribbean identity. Epistemological approaches within Indo-Caribbean scholarship that continue to marginalize queerness reproduce framings of national identity that render queerness absent within dominant constructions of both the nation-state and diaspora. Limited scholarly analysis of queer Indo-Caribbean cultural productions demonstrates a methodological insistence on a heteronormative paradigm 26 of Indo-Caribbean studies and the under-theorization of queer forms of cultural production. When attention is given to queerness, it is often treated as a new phenomenon rather than as an already present and integral aspect of Indo-Caribbean identity. Scholars such as Lauren Pragg, Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan and Angelique V. Nixon have explicitly approached Indo-Caribbean scholarship to disrupt its heteronormative paradigms, which preclude same-sex desire among women in the service of disciplining gender and sexuality within heteropatriarchal constructions of Indo-Caribbean identities. I echo such approaches in noting that chutney remains a prominent site of transnational Indo-Caribbean cultural production, yet epistemic approaches continue to read it as primarily heterosexual and gender normative. This heteronormative framing of the specific cultural performances of the chutney genre, its lyrical confrontations and its historical productions limits the possibilities for sites of Indo-Caribbean cultural production that can be read as queer—while obscuring the sites of analysis that are, in fact, declaratively queer. This essay seeks to expand upon existing epistemological approaches to Indo-Caribbean scholarship that challenge such framings, calling first for a methodology that queers the potential(s) of chutney, then engaging with a popular queer chutney song that centres same-sex female desire.

Queer (Indo-)Caribbean Methodologies The use of “queer” in this essay recognizes the term’s origins in the United States, from its radical deployment in LGBT activism to its endurance as a frame for theorizing gender and sexuality. As Jasbir Puar argues, liberal LGBT rights discourse functions within an international arena that positions the West as the site of liberation from the “homophobic and perverse”; this narrative simultaneously enables imperializing projects of “gay rights” while casting countries outside of the United States as temporally backwards (“Queer Times” 122). The Caribbean remains a particular site of scrutiny within globalizing LGBT rights discourse due to Western media narratives of rampant homophobic violence and governmental failures to decriminalize anti-sodomy laws. Yet this branding of queerness as antithetical to the Caribbean has positioned queerness as an anomaly that exists purely upon the margins of Caribbean societies and diasporas rather than being an integral component of them. This reading of queerness as a peculiarity of Caribbean sexuality is exacerbated by an underrepresentation of queer Indo-Caribbean scholarship. The use of “queer” in this argument thus acknowledges its theoretical origins in US academe; this essay approaches queerness as a methodology for expanding epistemological approaches to theorizing Indo-Caribbean scholarship. Rather than replicate the globalizing effects of “queer” as a totalizing catchall for all non-heteronormative sexualities and gender identities, this essay deploys queerness as a potential methodology for disrupting paradigms of heteronormative scholarly analysis. In their work on theorizing sexuality in the Caribbean, Angelique V. Nixon and Rosamond S. King examine the critical role of feminist methodology “to trace these relationships and investigations of gender, in part because they offer us a glimpse into both the silences and possibilities around the study of sexualities, same-sex desire, and sexual minorities in the region” (5). In this vein of glimpsing silences and possibilities within same-sex desire, this essay seeks to situate queerness within Indo-Caribbean scholarship as both an inherent element of cultural production and a terrain of epistemic possibilities. 27

Queering Jahaji Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo’s essay “Jahaji Bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and Homoerotic Subtext of Indo-Caribbean Identity” locates queerness as an inherent part of homosociality within Indo-Caribbean culture. He radically asserts, “jahaji bhai already contains a queer quality, and always has” (89). By queering the jahaji space, the ultimate signifier of Indo-Caribbean identity and archival signifier of Indo-Caribbean solidarity amidst the horrors of indentureship, Lokaisingh-Meighoo risks upending the norms of Indo-Caribbean epistemology. He names the “threatening act” of locating queerness within jahaji bhai culture as a confrontation with epistemic mistrust (91). Lokaisingh- Meighoo’s argument offers a new method of approaching Indo-Caribbean scholarship that resists the claims of queerness as temporally novel, while asserting its epistemic anchor. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley responds to the discursive production of heteronormativity within Middle Passage epistemology similarly, declaring, “You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic” (198). Queering the Atlantic is a radical epistemic act that reorients the discourse of alterity ascribed to queerness, making it the “already always” of historiography (Tinsley 203). Tinsley thus examines the relationships between slaves as temporally integral to black diasporic identity, despite the status accorded to black queer scholarship as the “dazzlingly new ‘discovery’ in academia” (193). Disrupting the temporality of queerness, Meighoo and Tinsley centre the homoerotic space of the (Indo-)Caribbean subject as a site of possibility.

Queering Indo-Caribbean Female Sexuality Dominant historical analysis of Indo-Caribbean female sexuality has continually precluded the scholarly possibilities of queerness among Indo-Caribbean women. Ghisyawan locates the entanglements of Indo-Caribbean women at the intersection of discourses of nationalism, racial “purity,” and demure femininity—the discourses that drive the politics of respectability and authenticity (158). Quests for diasporic authenticity and connection to a mythologized, imaginary homeland with heteronormative pressures complicate the possibilities of queer theorizing within Indo-Caribbean scholarship. As Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar articulate, An examination of Indo-Caribbean feminisms is a fraught endeavor, burdened as the figure of the Indo-Caribbean woman is with the weight of historical stereotypes and with competing contemporary expectations of the role she must play in community identity and in protection of what is seen as the boundaries of Indianness in the Caribbean. While contemporary Indo-Caribbean literature and scholarship have done much to push against these flattened versions of what Caribbean Indian femininity is or should be, the dominant notions of the Indo-Caribbean woman as Hindu, as passive, as heterosexual, as conservative, as submissive, as guardian of Indian culture via her body and her morality continue to haunt us. (1) The positioning of Indo-Caribbean women as diasporic bearers of normative Indian cultural identity is a familiar trope within post-indentureship gender genealogies, as affirmed by Gayatri Gopinath’s analysis of diasporic constructions of gender and sexuality among Indo-Caribbean women (162). The queer potential of chutney remains largely uninterrogated both as a site of investigation into visible transgressions of gender and sexuality by individuals of all genders who have deployed the space for unsettling the narrow parameters of the “female” and “male” gender binary, and as a 28 blatant site of homoeroticism. Scholars have largely neglected to assess chutney as a potential space for the expression of same-sex desire. Feminist interventions into the chutney genre have flirted with the possibilities of queer female desire originating in matikor spaces, but as Pragg notes, there remains an insufficient investigation into the potentialities of queer Indo-Caribbean encounters within the chutney space (6). Gopinath articulates the shortcomings of scholarly analysis of chutney as simply “a representation of Indian women’s sexual autonomy in the face of opposition from a Hindu male elite” (162). Critiquing Tejaswini Niranjana’s essay, “Left to the Imagination: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad,” Gopinath introduces the possibility of reading women-only spaces of chutney performance as spaces of queer desire (163). Scholarship examining the origins of chutney in matikor, the women-only celebratory space of pre-wedding rituals, overwhelmingly documents chutney as a heteronormative practice, despite the tradition of women mimicking sexual behaviour with each other in matikor. Niranjana’s analysis is not singular in this omission of queer potential within the matikor space, as the scholarship on Indo-Caribbean histories commonly uses a heteronormative lens. Theorizations of chutney frequently relegate Indo-Caribbean women to a postcolonial site on which Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean men compete for the nation (Gopinath 162). Gopinath’s analysis of the queer potential of Indo-Caribbean female sexuality is a critical counter to scholarship that reads Indo-Caribbean women’s homoerotics within the chutney space as simply performing within the bounds of heterosexuality. Even though the chutney space is visually queered through a homoerotics of lusty wining, queer Indo-Caribbean sexuality is precluded in discourses that de-sexualize an explicitly sexual space. For example, Gopinath notes that, in his analysis of chutney, ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel explicitly denies the undertones of “lesbianism”; he argues that the genre simply represents female sexuality independent of men (Gopinath 163). Interestingly, Manuel presents chutney as an “expression of sensuality in a way that is not necessarily gendered” (27). He suggests that the effeminacy exhibited by participating men and the “lusty wining” by women with each other present no threat to the heterosexual paradigm of Indo-Caribbean culture (27). Through this de-gendering of the chutney space, Manuel strips it of queer potential, then straightens its outright instantiations of queerness. Gopinath reads Manuel’s analysis of effeminate dancing between Indo- Caribbean men as pre-emptively limiting the queer potential of chutney because Manuel argues that “male dance partners need not to be assumed to be homosexual” (163). Gopinath correctly reads Manuel’s observations as neutralizing chutney’s homoeroticism (163). Yet, according to Gopinath, Manuel also argues that “the Trinidad chutney scene has opened space for a small but flamboyant gay subculture” (Gopinath 163), which in turn opens possibilities for queerness. In fact, Manuel’s analysis serves to delegitimize conceptions of queerness as antithetical to heteronormative Indo-Caribbean communities by naming the presence of the “gay” community, despite his homogenization of all non-heterosexual genders and sexualities. Manuel’s observation though, in emphasizing the potential “opening” of a space for queerness within Indo-Caribbean cultural production, marks “homosexuality” as external to Indo-Caribbean culture. This paradox of precluding queerness within chutney while simultaneously citing chutney’s role in enabling a gay subculture reflects the heteronormative framing that denies queerness as foundational to Indo-Caribbean cultural production. A disruption of the preoccupation with framing chutney as heteronormative is evident in Jasbir Puar’s article “Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities in Trinidad.” Published just three years after Manuel’s essay, Puar writes about Indo-Caribbean drag performers in Trinidad. These performers are described as neither explicitly out, nor “closeted,” nor explicitly queer; Puar thus makes an important scholarly contribution to disrupting an “out” versus “closeted” binary understanding of queerness in Indo-Caribbean communities (“Global” 1058). Vik and Sasha, two Indo-Caribbean 29 performers, transgress heteronormative gender roles by engaging in Bollywood drag performances within queer performance and heterosexual wedding spaces. Puar calls into question the use of the term “drag” within the context of historical “female impersonation” in Bollywood and gender fluid plays on performance (1058–59). She presents a critical epistemological intervention in Indo-Caribbean performance studies, reading non-heteronormative genders and sexualities as integral sites of cultural production. Puar’s essay also disrupts Manuel’s claims that “gay liberation has followed in the wake of female liberation” (Manuel 28) by situating queerness as not temporally bound, nor within any dominant “gay rights” frameworks. Queerness then, in Puar’s essay, presents itself within the “already always” vein of jahaji culture.

Queering Chutney The chutney arena is a site of transnational cultural production, circulating between the Caribbean and its diasporas in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The intergenerational artists who occupy the genre reflect both entrenched and evolving attitudes toward gender and sexuality. The spaces of performance range from singing and dancing competitions to music videos, deejay remixes, and concert circuits. Linguistically, chutney inhabits Caribbean Creole, Bhojpuri, Hindi, and English lyrics. Although the multivalent sites of chutney representation and transnational circulation cannot be distilled into a single narrative, the chutney performance space remains a contested site of visible sexuality, fetishization of female sexuality, and racialized politics (A. Mohammed 2, 6; Puri 134–35; Pragg 9, 12).1 Chutney serves as a site of the male gaze and, simultaneously, as a place of subversion for Indo-Caribbean female sexuality (A. Mohammed 2; Pragg 7). Theoretical interventions into the chutney space, as a genre and site of public performance, must account for its status as a paradoxical site of cultural production. As Shalini Puri articulates, public chutney performances contain a “contradictory field of possibilities,” where the boundaries of liberation and oppression are blurred (160). Debating the liberatory/oppressive dichotomy within chutney proves a disappointing intervention since it relies on the assumption that Indo-Caribbean women’s sexuality is uniquely repressed. Instead, the chutney space should be approached as a site of subversive sexualities within the context of empire and (post-)indentureship, and as part of the broader socio-cultural implications of post-indentureship liberatory politics. Problematic and erroneous scholarly framing of queer sites of production ultimately serves a project of epistemic violence (Pragg 13). As Pragg notes, the queering of both matikor spaces and homosocial spaces is trumped by “heterosexist assumptions operating within dominant discourses of Caribbean studies, liberal feminism, and postcolonial studies at large” (13). Queering chutney as a methodological intervention might serve as a reorientation of Indo-Caribbean queerness from a status of alterity toward centrality as both an object of inquiry and authoritative site of epistemic production. The tendency to negate the possibilities of queerness within Indo-Caribbean culture seemingly stems from what David Scott deems a diaspora’s “ideological desire to supply a foundational past and the sustained epistemological preoccupation with verification and corroboration that depends for its plausibility upon the seeming oppositional virtue of that desire” (21). In other words, the desire to locate (or deny) queerness within Indo-Caribbean historiography is tied up in diasporic searches for authenticity. An orientation toward the archive undergirds Indo-Caribbean epistemological approaches, but this orientation might prove an insufficient method of disrupting heteronormative paradigms within Indo-Caribbean scholarship. It ultimately reproduces the assumptions of scholars like Niranjana and Manuel, which, as Pragg notes, preclude the queer potential of blatantly homoerotic spaces. 30

In the essay “Without a Trace,” Anjali Arondekar notes that queering the archive is complicated by colonialism and the historical truth claims proposed by archival methods. Arondekar writes, “Sexuality studies is an accomplice in such archival mythmaking and must remain alert to its own methodological and analytical foibles” (27). Arondekar calls for a methodological shift that interrogates the role of the archive, citing Nayan Shah’s declaration that queer individuals rely upon the archival method to recover “a history to sanction our existence” (Arondekar 16). Indo-Caribbean scholarship, as an epistemology that relies heavily upon the archive, attaches itself to an ontologically heteronormative Indo-Caribbean subject that subsequently prevents analysis of Indo-Caribbean queer communities and cultural practices. Aliyah Khan writes that “while questing for queers in the historical record may uncover a few instances of interest, we may not find the ancestor we are looking for” (252). While the archival attachment remains in the foreground of Indo-Caribbean scholarship, this attachment reveals a method that relies upon the verification of queerness in order to theorize its presence. The evolution of chutney is notable for both its origins within female-only spaces of Hindu pre- wedding ceremonies and its present-day circulation in Caribbean popular culture as a male-dominated Indo-Caribbean musical form (Reddock 272). This appropriation of a female rootedness presents an interesting disruption of the patriarchal ideals of the nation-state, which read maleness as universal. The emergence of younger artists within a genre historically occupied by older men and women testifies to the genre’s relevance as an enduring musical form, and as Aisha Mohammed notes, functions as a site where young Indo-Caribbean men “establish their masculinity” (31). Thus, chutney serves as an arena for producing gendered norms of national identities, both local and diasporic. Lokaisingh- Meighoo observes that chutney culture interpellates a gendered feminine subject; yet this chutney subject is already read as heterosexual (81). If homoeroticism visually emerges within the chutney space through women “wining” on each other, the potential for queerness is punctured by the insistence that the wining is devoid of queer sexuality. Alternately, women are read as simply passive agents within male discourse (A. Mohammed 31). This insistence on heterosexuality subsequently under-theorizes queerness in explicitly queer female spaces of homoeroticism. By relegating male sexuality to a secondary site of analysis, the chutney song “Tek Sunita” presents an affirmative queer female sexuality that challenges the idea of patriarchal Indo-Caribbean domesticity as a terminal site of female sexual possibility.

“Tek Sunita” Upending the notion of Indo-Caribbean women as the repository of heteronormative cultural identity, the 2009 chutney single, “Tek Sunita (Nadia’s Reply),” affirms queer Indo-Caribbean female desire and agency—and, consequently, offers a queer feminist reconfiguration of a musical genre historically produced within the parameters of Indo-Caribbean patriarchy. Performed by the chutney- soca artist Princess Anisa of the international chutney Supertones Band, “Tek Sunita” transgresses the boundaries of gender prescribed for Indo-Caribbean femininity. Princess Anisa has put forward socially conscious songs in the past such as “Love Is the Answer,” released in 2014 and performed with Terry Gajraj and Anant Hansraj (A9) in response to increased rates of suicide in Guyana. The location of Princess Anisa as a United States–based artist is significant, since the popularity of “Tek Sunita” throughout the Indo-Caribbean diaspora attests to the enduring transnational momentum of chutney; to date, the song has nearly 1.7 million views on YouTube. The song is sexually outright in its articulation of queer female desire, serving as an oppositional force to Indo-Caribbean sexuality culturally relegated and confined to a patriarchal domestic sphere. “Tek Sunita” thus offers a queer feminist intervention by 31 subverting the common chutney narrative of the submissive Indo-Caribbean woman while affirming (queer) female sexuality within a genre publicly dominated by Indo-Caribbean men (Bergman 18; Hosein and Outar 1; Reddock 274). Subtitled “Nadia’s Reply,” the lyrics of “Tek Sunita” offer Nadia’s first-person account of her affair with Sunita, who is in a relationship with an alcoholic Indo-Caribbean man. The song, which is presented as a response to an earlier popular chutney single, “Catch Meh Lovah,” by the soca-chutney artists KI and JMC 3veni, details the formations of the queer affair. In “Catch Meh Lovah,” the jilted crooner wails about the infidelity of his lover, Sunita: Ah see them together, boy it send up me pressure Catch me lovah inside me car with her longtime school partner Catch Sunita inside me car with Nadia from Couva Catch Sunita inside me car with Nadia from Couva As a response, “Tek Sunita” is notable not just for its foregrounding of a same-sex relationship, but also for its feminist message in a genre that has now become more publicly associated with male vocal performances (A. Mohammed 22). The popularity of male contemporary chutney artists obscures the genre’s roots within the all-women Hindu space of matikor rituals (A. Mohammed 2; Pragg 6). Tina K. Ramnarine notes that , one of the most famous and earliest performers of chutney, claims a role in originating the genre in 1973, but she also notes that his self-proclaimed status as a “founding father” of chutney is disputed because the term was in circulation prior to 1973 (“Historical” 13). Although Popo cites the Hindu wedding space as the formative site of his exposure to Indian wedding songs, he fails to mention both matikor and women. Popular contemporary songs that establish chutney as a primary form of Indo-Caribbean cultural production often reinscribe the omission of women. This male appropriation of chutney subsequently obscures the historical role of Indo-Caribbean women in establishing the genre (Ramnarine, “Historical” 15). The fetishization of queer female same-sex desire is an obvious and unfortunate theme of heteropatriarchy. Yet “Catch Meh Lovah” refrains from this fetishization, presenting same-sex desire between women simply as infidelity: “Sunita always tell meh she go love meh forever / She mek me believe that we go grow old together” (KI and JMC 3Veni). In this representation of infidelity, “Catch Meh Lovah” subverts the power of the oft-cited fetishizing male gaze within chutney (A. Mohammed 2). The male crooner laments the loss of his future of growing old with Sunita since his discovery potentially signals more than simply a one-time casual affair. Catching Sunita with “she longtime school partner” suggests the “already always” queer quality of jahaji culture, as Sunita and Nadia are seemingly heterosexual companions within Indo-Caribbean homosocial spatiality. The dimension of the male lover “catching” Sunita in his own car declares the obvious queerness he resists recognizing. Sunita’s queerness is not hidden, but her male lover is in denial. Heteronormative determinism leads to the failure to account for queer bodies in plain sight. “Tek Sunita” is an interesting object of inquiry because it appears as a queer feminist response to the ditched male lover from the other woman’s point of view. The audaciously queer lyrics are a nod to an Indo-Caribbean female sexuality exercised outside the traditional confines of heteronormative domesticity, and a sexual agency that privileges queerness as the ultimate satisfactory experience of desire: 32

If yuh know what went on in yuh bruk up Corolla Mek Sunita leave you and go because I do it better Tek Sunita from Baritaria and bring she to Couva Tek Sunita from Baritaria and bring she to Couva Chutney songs often include representations of the role and expectations of female domesticity, and, ultimately, gendered roles of sexuality and agency. Men bemoan having to “come home early” from gallivanting with their friends, emphasizing their will to “never come home sober” (Ravi B, “Ah Drinka”). A common portrayal of the Indo-Caribbean female post-nuptial experience in contemporary chutney songs is one of a new bride mistrustful of her husband, waiting for him to come home from rum drinking and constantly calling him via cellphone. Rhoda Reddock refers to the tendency of male chutney artists to present an Indo-Caribbean masculinity of “no culpability,” and behaviour that Aisha Mohammed notes ranges from apathetic to violent (Reddock 273; A. Mohammed 26–27). Chutney thus retains its status as a prominent site of Indo-Caribbean cultural production and the transmission of gender roles (Bergman 2; A. Mohammed 6). The historical prevalence of gender-based violence experienced by Indo-Caribbean women remains a theme within chutney, as Mohammed details through her cataloguing of eight major themes of gender negotiations within the genre (10–12). Although Aisha Mohammed identifies a pattern of men singing about the ills of domestic violence to other men, songs by male chutney artists overwhelmingly reinscribe patriarchal gender roles, blatantly normalizing both domestic violence and abuse. Aisha Mohammed cites artists like Rikki Jai whose song lyrics describe him violently kicking his potential wife, while other songs contain themes of suspicious, manipulating or unfaithful women (16, 26). Chutney is also notable, however, for providing an arena for transgressing patriarchal norms within Indo-Caribbean culture (Ramnarine, “Historical” 15). Drupatee Ramgoonai, Rasika Dindial, and Phulmatie Ramjattan established the genre, producing an initial feminist framing of chutney that affirmed female sexuality and countered patriarchal discourse (A. Mohammed 12–14). The feminist agency of “Tek Sunita” thus inherits a genealogy of Indo-Caribbean women resisting the narrow inscriptions of gender often presented by male chutney artists. The recurring chutney theme of the pestering wife who lacks agency is displaced in “Tek Sunita,” which shifts the female object of desire from the sphere of domesticity and presents an empowering queer female agency. Creating a chutney song on the premise of queer Indo-Caribbean female sexuality disrupts the present patriarchal dominance of chutney and foregrounds female Indo-Caribbean queerness within the genre. Parenthetically dubbed “Nadia’s Reply,” “Tek Sunita” follows the chutney tradition of lashback where singers provocatively respond to another chutney single by criticizing the song, singer, or both (A. Mohammed 8). “Tek Sunita” thus also follows a tradition of lyrical confrontation within chutney enacted by Indo-Caribbean women to confront male partners, publicly challenging prescribed roles of female sexuality and mandated fidelity. Chutney songs like Rasika Dindial’s “Lazy Man” and Drupatee Ramgoonai’s “Husband Only Want Meh to Cook” ground this tradition of feminist lashback that counters patriarchal discourses (A. Mohammed 13). “Tek Sunita” does not however follow the thread of songs performed in the “pleading and urgent tone” of women who lyrically lodge complaints about their husbands; it subverts the trope of the forlorn Indo-Caribbean woman who longs for her good-for- nothing husband at home (Reddock 273). Confronting alcoholism within the Indo-Caribbean domestic sphere, Nadia sings, “Sunita gone and tell me that you drink rum whole night / and when she start to complain is one fuss and fight / so while you’re gone boy I mek she feel real nice” (Princess Anisa). This critique of a rum-drinking male partner is significant given the trope in contemporary chutney music where men relinquish responsibility for alcoholism (Reddock 273). Some popular chutney songs offer 33 misogyny-fueled statements ranging from regret about getting married to preference for rum over Indo- Caribbean women. Lyrics like “Ah shoulda neva ask you to marry me” (Ramotaur) and “Rum is meh lova and I don’ care” (Ravi B) are reminiscent of vocals from earlier chutney artists like Sundar Popo. Ravi B, a young chutney artist, mimics the earlier crooning of Popo to present an Indo-Caribbean masculinity that beckons to the past. Popo’s earlier songs of love, loss and Indo-Caribbean village life present the male Indo-Caribbean subject as pitifully pining after his lover, “You teach me how to love you and not to forget / Don’t leave me with a bruk up heart filled with regret” (Popo). Tina K. Ramnarine notes that Popo’s songs centralize iconic figures of Indo-Caribbean life, including the cane fields, rum, pholourie, and chutney (“‘Indian’ Music” 147). Despite several songs positioning himself as a pitiful lover, Popo nonetheless criticizes women who do not fulfill traditional domestic gender roles in the song “Doltish Boy” (Ramnarine, “Historical” 24). He offers a premise of Indo-Caribbean women’s agency in relationships while reaffirming the role of Indo-Caribbean men in demarcating gender roles. These chutney songs centralizing the woes of Indo-Caribbean men assert an Indo-Caribbean masculinity constructed in direct opposition to the domestic sphere: masculinity is constructed upon ideas of agency, independence and the normalization of alcoholism within postcolonial, post- indentureship society—and the replacement of sexual desire for a woman by the desire for rum. Aisha Mohammed also notes that women are lyrically blamed for failed relationships (12). “Tek Sunita” both airs women’s objections to these versions of masculinity and subverts the role of the docile woman, or the woman waiting on her lover to reform.

The “Tekking” of Sunita Culturally sanctioned gender-based violence against Indo-Caribbean women survives in present- day Indo-Caribbean popular culture. Chutney songs normalizing the lack of women’s agency, and celebrating alcoholism and blatant misogyny are examples of this. Publicly naming domestic violence in a postcolonial, post-plantation economy is both an audacious lyrical act and a critique of a culturally accepted Indo-Caribbean masculinity. The lyrical confrontation also represents an Indo-Caribbean feminist resistance to the cultural acceptance of domestic violence and patriarchal control of women’s bodies, while presenting a clear queer alternative to the heteronormative parameters of domesticity. Nadia’s description of the jilted ex’s “bruk up” Corolla signifies the brokenness of the heteronormative paradigm of Indo-Caribbean intimacy, offering Sunita a chance at sexual fulfillment and agency beyond the “bruk up” confines of an oppressive domestic sphere. Knowledge, too, is intimate and gendered: Only a woman knows what it takes to make another woman[’s] legs start to shake So in your car, boy, it was a real earthquake (Princess Anisa) Initially, Sunita’s male ex does not know about the affair, nor does he know what it takes to please Sunita. Queerness becomes both a site of cultural resistance and also of a separate space of agency regarding sexual knowledge that binds and satisfies the two women. The song presents a queer female sexuality devoid of the parameters of heteronormativity that have historically and culturally produced an Indo-Caribbean masculinity constructed upon controlling female sexuality (P. Mohammed 188). Nadia and Sunita audaciously erect Indo-Caribbean sexuality outside of the domestic sphere and in the absence of a monogamous marriage. The women serve their own desires independent of patriarchy. Accordingly, the explicit situating of the affair within the car of Sunita’s male lover defiles the car as 34 a site of male ownership. The materiality of the car is significant for the queer subversion; not only does Nadia “tek” Sunita, but she does so in the man’s car as an affront to lackluster and unfulfilling heteronormativity. In the “tekking” of Sunita, respatialization signifies the potential for a reclaiming of sexuality. Nadia “teks” Sunita from the male protagonist, an act of claiming Sunita for her own; but the act of “tekking” is also a sexual act. Nadia also “teks” Sunita from Barataria to Couva, a spatial reorientation that might possibly enable a freedom for the queer lovers beyond the physical site of the domestic sphere. By asserting the “tekking” of Sunita, Nadia also reorients gender roles and challenges the gendered limits of possession demonstrated by the heterosexual Indo-Caribbean domestic sphere. If heterosexual domesticity represents the confines of rigid gender roles for Indo-Caribbeans, “tekking” Sunita removes her from a site of oppression toward a site of pleasure. Furthermore, the taking of Sunita from Barataria to Couva, a traditionally more Indian area of Trinidad, is an affirmation of queer identity as not antithetical to Indo-Caribbean identity but situated within its nucleus. The lyrically audacious song thus represents a queering of chutney, a queering of female agency and a queering of Indo-Caribbean identity.

Conclusion The failure to approach Indo-Caribbean epistemology through a consideration of queer possibilities and queer potentialities reinscribes an assumed heteronormative Indo-Caribbean subject. Queering chutney as a methodology enables the theorization of Indo-Caribbean queer cultural productions as necessary epistemic interventions. “Tek Sunita” offers a subversive site of intervention into the genre of chutney, serving as a queer feminist response to cultural and historical misogyny while radically disrupting the genre of chutney’s centring of Indo-Caribbean masculinity and heteronormativity. As a queer feminist chutney single, “Tek Sunita” reworks this uniquely Indo-Caribbean genre of music and claims it within inscriptions of queer desire. Unsettling heteronormativity from its position as the ultimate signifier of Indo-Caribbean sites and spaces of cultural production, from the archive and beyond, enables more epistemic possibilities. Upending the facade of a static heteronormative cultural signifier also enables Indo-Caribbean epistemology to radically reassess its anchors of identity, opening possibilities for challenging the entirety of its racial, sexual and gendered signifiers.

Acknowledgements I am most grateful to Lisa Outar, who has witnessed several iterations of this essay, and to the two anonymous readers for their generative feedback. I also thank Sean Meighoo, Lynne Huffer, Falguni Sheth, Elizabeth Wilson and Michelle Wright for expertise, generosity and insight.

Notes 1 For a genealogy of chutney and Indo-Caribbean women’s place within it, see Tina K. 35

Ramnarine’s Creating Their Own Space: The Development of an Indian-Caribbean Musical Tradition and Shalini Puri’s The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity.

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“I Am Not What You Think”: Sexual Fetishism in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda Tuli Chatterji

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/cu5QpZmrmc8

I can tell you what it’s like to live as a man, what it’s like to want to live so

badly, and with some semblance of dignity, you’d do just about anything.

— Patricia Powell, The Pagoda 241, emphases mine

These eyes don’t miss anything at all, Mr. Lowe. I see everything. I know what

go on in that house. I know the show.

— Patricia Powell, The Pagoda 126, emphasis mine 39

These quotations from Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (1998) underscore a form of forced gender performance that re-idealizes masculinity as “dignity” while also directing our attention to a “show” of gendered selves. In the first quotation, we witness the desperation of Mr. Lowe, a Chinese non- transgender man-woman, attempting to come to terms with his female body, which he has had to conceal to have “some semblance of dignity” in society. Born a woman but forced to live as a man for survival, Lowe reflects on his many crossings—gender, national, sexual—to contextualize colonial violence against femininity and expose hegemonic atrocities perpetuating normative heterosexuality. By appropriating masquerade, costume, disguise and improvisation, Lowe’s feminine body and his masculine identity initiate significant slippages from heterosexual to homosexual desires, all while critiquing regulatory conventions circumscribing body and sexual activities. In the second quotation, Omar, the bachelor son of Lowe’s housemaid Dulcie, threatens with his gaze to disclose the secrets of Mr. Lowe and Miss Sylvie. Omar’s words register the visual tensions between representation and authenticity that often complicate the negotiation with each term. His awareness of the presence of a “show” and his knowledge about the show reveal a conflict between “see[ing]” and “know[ing].” By emphasizing vision through words such as “these eyes” and “I see,” Omar foregrounds this embedded conflict that is central to the novel’s critique of colonial representations of gender normativity. This essay will extend Donette Francis’s reading of The Pagoda as a “queer genealogy of Caribbean modernity” (25) to initiate a postcolonial critique of sexual fetishism that offers ways of envisioning female sexual citizenship not available in the context of heteropatriarchal discourse. Through complex negotiation with the phallus, such as donning a fake moustache to represent masculinity, the fetishized body will evade certainties, to use Sheri-Marie Harrison’s terminology (3), to systematically disengage with phallocentric structures that inhibit freedom, agency and resistance. Lowe’s appropriation of performative queerness exposes the crisis embedded in his identity, thereby giving prominence to sexual subjectivities rendered invisible by diverse economic, cultural, political and social realities of the Caribbean. His androgynous appearance and mannerisms—a fake moustache and a feminine laugh—not only mimic the phallus by attempting to appropriate the power attached with it but also employ it to de-centre the prestige and privileges that accrue to the phallus without rejecting its role in the discourse of desire. Encoding these desires into the matrix of postcolonial Caribbean sexual epistemology will help us question the colonial norms of heterosexual respectability, critique Western representations of masculinity and celebrate bodies and desires popularly labelled as “deviant, queer, or perverse” (Smith 1, 8). Faith Smith indicates that though Caribbean feminists have laid the groundwork for recent scholarship on sexuality, these conversations about the intersection of race, nationalism and sexual propriety have largely disregarded non-heteronormative practices (8). But to disregard the histories of racial, cultural, geographical and gender crossings in the Caribbean is to remain blind to the effect of what M. Jacqui Alexander describes as “oppositional knowledges and political mobilizations” in the region (5). Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley further points out that “‘Pure womanness’ was as much an invention of white supremacy as of heteropatriarchy” (14). Powell’s diasporic location facilitates a transnational conversation on un-silencing suppressed Caribbean narratives of non-heteronormative sexuality that many Caribbean-based writers, critics and photographers like Michael Bucknor and O’Neil Lawrence have also engaged with when reflecting on the tensions, contradictions and dissonances that reshape and reformulate Caribbean masculine/feminist cartography. I read these dissonances as territorialization of multiple forms of crisis embedded within Lowe, who in his role as 40 a Chinese “man” in colonial Jamaica becomes the female fetishist strategically negotiating with wider social and political conditions of the time. Theorists Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell suggest that a form outside the “feminine body” is needed to counter the oppressive hegemony of the phallus; this notion is particularly helpful in constructing Lowe as a female fetishist. The feminine body—an already negative construction in Freudian psychoanalysis—does not, as Rose and Mitchell argue, wield the power to challenge the status of the phallus: “If the status of the phallus is to be challenged, it cannot, therefore, be directly from the feminine body but must be by means of a different symbolic term” (56). Powell’s Lowe becomes this unique form—neither a man nor a woman but a symbolic hermaphrodite—who by essentializing multiple unresolvable social/cultural/racial conflicts within himself, also initiates a counter-hegemonic dialogue with and against the phallus that helps reflect how an alternative logic of symbolization might create new genealogies of understanding sexual fetishisms in a Caribbean context. In Fictions of Feminine Citizenship (2010), Donette Francis uses the term “antiromance” to focus on unresolved “contradictions” that “capture the instability … of narrative form when trying to tell stories of Caribbean intimacy” (7–8). A fetish discourse too in many ways echoes the crisis yet to be settled by the fetishist. Unlike Francis, who employs the feminine pronoun and A-yin instead of the novel’s use of “he” and Mr. Lowe, I use the masculine pronoun to serve as a reminder of how Lowe’s slippery multilayered masquerade as man/wife, son/daughter, father/mother, Chinese/Jamaican helps explore contradictions specific to sexual fetishism that are in conversation with an either/or binary of gender and sexual subjectivities. By delineating the effects of objectifying and fetishizing the female body in The Pagoda, I show how the novel assists in exposing the circumstances that lead to fetishization, thereby positioning Powell’s novel as one that interrogates and indeed reshapes existing understandings about sexual fetishism and actively addresses a history of systemic silencing of marginalized bodies and non- heteronormative desires. For Powell, it is imperative to initiate a discussion that would legitimize the sexual identities of all communities in the Caribbean. In her interview with Stephen Narain (2014), Powell states the importance of exploring Chinese experiences in Jamaica to help resurface the “complexities of otherness for … people who are neither black nor white” (“(Re-)Constructing” 3). Harrison, too, echoes Winifred Woodhull, arguing that “The Pagoda’s engagement with a Chinese protagonist … is indicative of a specifically Caribbean historical experience” that cannot be reduced to traditional “black/white racial models” (5). Natalie Wei’s documentary Chinee Girl continues the focus on Chinese experiences in the Caribbean, thereby in many ways reinforcing Powell’s aim to have her stories serve as platforms for “social, political, and spiritual questions” (“(Re-)Constructing” 9). The Pagoda, set in 1893, tells the story of a young girl, Lau A-yin, born to a lower-class family in the Guangdong Province of China. She is raised as a boy by her father until she reaches puberty, after which, repelled by her body, he betrays her and marries her off to an older man to pay an outstanding debt. To escape the brutality of the marriage, Lau boards a ship headed to Jamaica but is soon discovered by the captain, Cecil. He imprisons her and tortures and rapes her repeatedly. She becomes pregnant. At a time when Chinese women were forbidden by law to emigrate, Lau A-yin is forced by circumstances to bind her chest and disguise herself as a man. She assumes the identity of Mr. Lowe, takes up shopkeeping and marries Miss Sylvie, an octoroon, so that Sylvie can play the role of the mother to Lowe’s young daughter, Elizabeth. Sylvie herself is a convicted felon because she murdered her white husband after giving birth to brown babies. Gender crossing and racial passing intersect in Lowe’s and Sylvie’s marriage as each respectively assumes the social identity of the father and the mother to Elizabeth. As a result of this arrangement, Lowe becomes the subordinate father figure in child rearing while Miss Sylvie takes up the dominant role. 41

The novel commences with Lowe attempting, with multiple failures, to write a letter to his estranged daughter, whom he has not seen in two decades. As he writes his letter, he receives the news that his shop has been set on fire, resulting in the death of Cecil, who used to visit the household occasionally in between his trips abroad. Haunted by the memory of his feminine body, an estranged daughter, a false moustache, sham marriage and an identity with “nothing womanly about him” (Powell, Pagoda 118), Lowe desires a centre, a grounding to save him from “placelessness” (130). His zealous commitment to build a pagoda acts as an antidote to the historical, linguistic, sexual and gender violence that has displaced him from his country, language, body, and culture: the building would act as the cultural centre for the indentured Chinese community in Jamaica, a “school for the Chinese children born on the island” (40) and a “clubhouse” (79) for his people, and at the same time save his daughter from amnesia. Lowe’s displacement often registers in Powell’s depiction of his non-heteronormative sexual desires, which are set in relief by his relationship with Sylvie. Overwhelmed by his sham heterosexual marriage to her, Lowe occasionally undertakes journeys from his shop on the back of a mule to visit Sharmilla, the Indian wife of his fellow Chinese Kywing, and Joyce, whose “plump brown muscled legs … and arms” (151) soothe and comfort him during times of distress. The desire to be in the company of Sharmilla and Joyce stands in sharp contrast to his desperation to escape Sylvie’s desire for him. In his role as Sylvie’s husband, Lowe ceases to be himself. Therefore, it is only after she leaves him towards the end of the novel that Lowe is able to confront his sham identity and finally write the letter to his daughter that he so desired from the beginning. Prominent readings of The Pagoda have opened up new understandings of intersectional identities from a postcolonial Caribbean perspective. In her essay “Archives of the Black Atlantic: Postcolonial Citation in The Pagoda” (2010), Wendy W. Walters reveals her use of a transnational archive as she decodes the ways in which Lowe gives voice to the “coolie” trade in helping rewrite diaspora identities (163). Timothy Chin too, in his essay “The Novels of Patricia Powell: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Across the Disjunctures of the Caribbean Diaspora” (2007), elucidates the ways in which the diaspora functions as a site where “subjectivity is re-worked and reimagined” (534). Focusing on “non- heteronormative subjectivity,” Sheri-Marie Harrison argues that Lowe’s queerness contextualizes the “evasion of certainties” in the novel, which then becomes a way to unravel unexplored power relations “within the decolonization process” (2, 11). In terms of theorizing gender-crossing in the Caribbean, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, and Lawrence Scott’s Aelred’s Sin have offered significant insights to facilitate a discussion on the subject. What distinguishes The Pagoda from these other texts is that Lowe’s becoming a man stemmed from circumstances over which he had very little control. That does not, however, eliminate his desire to return to his feminine identity. This justifies my earlier description of Lowe as non- transgender man-woman. While Harry/Harriet in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven is also a product, like Lowe, of social and cultural forces inhibiting gender crossing, unlike Cliff’s transgender Harry/Harriet who knew that “we will have to make [a] choice … cyaan live split” (131), Powell’s Lowe embodies the split as the novel ends with the carpenter Jake saying, “Yes, ma’am, Mr. Lowe” (Powell, Pagoda 241). Lowe’s becoming the man, as I argue, does not foreclose the duality but generates a conversation that simultaneously juxtaposes the identities of “ma’am” and “Mr. Lowe.” Further, while for Francis the use of the feminine pronoun helps us understand Lowe’s memory of sexual trauma, for the purposes of this essay, focusing on the masculine pronoun/split identity is necessary to construct him as a voice that can relate to and critique the masculinity/femininity binary. 42

The question follows: is it possible to determine female fetishism in the visible absence of the female body? At the end of the novel, Lowe rejects his masquerade and returns to his feminine self, thus allowing us to rethink non-reductive possibilities of how a feminist intervention can help redefine gender boundaries and envision solidarity with both heterosexual and homoerotic desires. Unlike the characters of Tyler, Otoh and Sid from Mootoo’s novels or Harry/Harriet from Cliff’s, who embrace a body that counters their biological affiliation, The Pagoda represents a journey towards identification with the self that had to be masked to assimilate in a patriarchal world. In her book Island Bodies (2014), Rosamond S. King voices her hesitation to use Western terminologies like transgender “because North Americans and Europeans have historically defined and continue to define Caribbeanness, and especially Caribbean gender and sexualities, in derogatory ways” (21). Echoing King, I too decline to use the terms lesbian/gay/transgender or cross-dresser to describe Lowe, though I agree that the relationships that Lowe engages with can performatively be bracketed as one or more of the above terms. One significant problem in applying Western terminology is that, while LGBTQ organizations in the United States are often single-issue political entities that primarily focus on the human rights of these communities, in the Caribbean we cannot envision a discussion without taking into consideration the histories of transatlantic slavery and indentured labour from China and India. I acknowledge the undeniable influence of Western modernity in complicating the construction of any possible binary between the Caribbean/West. While I agree that labelling Caribbean as non-Western can be problematic, my main concern lies in using North American and European terms “that do not resonate within the region,” which, if utilized, would then, as King states, support the popular belief that “unconventional genders and nonheteronormative sexualities” are alien to the Caribbean (21). Race is integral for the queer Caribbean. Therefore, in accordance with King, it can be rightfully said that “to use a term in an inappropriate context is to erase the specificity of that context and the agency of the individual…” (94). By not choosing himself to be a man or a cross-dresser—both identities enforced on him earlier by his father and later by Cecil—Powell’s Lowe becomes a figure directing our attention to thevisibly invisible bodies in the Caribbean that act to continuously defy the trajectories set for them by domestic, social or legal spheres. Lowe’s ambivalent identity and his desire for a pagoda symbolically create a bridge between Jamaican male-sexual minority organizations focusing on belonging and coalition strategies, and women-sexual minority organizations aimed at support and community building. Before I move further, a brief description of fetishes is worth consideration. Originating from the Portuguese word feitico, fetishes are defined as territorialization of a crisis onto a material object that symbolizes an irresolvable conflict within the fetishist. A fetishist is someone who projects his/her consciousness and intentions onto the object and endows it with power to un-silence wider social, racial and sexual dynamics. Fetishism, therefore, as it will be analyzed here, is not only about sexuality, but also about power and perception. In The Pagoda, the crisis is the tension between Lowe’s female body and the masculine identity forced on him by his father Lau Shiu-t’ong as a child and by Cecil who smuggled and raped him en route from Kwangtung, China, to Jamaica, compelling him to live the life of a man for forty years. On many occasions, Lowe reflects on himself as “a girl who used to be a wife” (186), reinforcing the split between his past and present. Therefore, his phallic masquerade—the moustache, the cloth that bandages his chest—becomes for him the material objects, the fetishes, through which Lowe gains symbolic control over his own ambiguous identities as son/daughter, mother/father, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual that torment his flesh and imagination. Lowe’s masquerade, accomplished 43 with moustache and the cloth, also empowers him in a way that he knows he otherwise lacks. Therefore, while fetishizing reinforces heteronormativity, fetishism also becomes a process that enables the visibility of certain marginalized/queer Caribbean identities. This leads us to the following questions: does his return to a female identity towards the end of the novel signify a resolution of the crisis? Though Lowe abandons the “bristle-black brush of hair pasted … above his thin lips” (19), he is never free from the memory of the father that makes it impossible to construct a discourse without being in conversation with the phallus. Powell, too, never abandons the pronoun “he” when referring to Lowe. What follows therefore is this: if Lowe never detaches himself from the influence of the phallus in his life, which is further corroborated later by his heterosexual relationship with Omar, then it is possible to theorize that Lowe’s return to his female self helps generate a Caribbean discourse of feminist intervention in traditional phallocentric structures of sexual fetishism. Acknowledging the presence of multiple desires that are not reducible to a single domain gives credence to unregistered narratives of sexual fetishisms in the Caribbean. The Pagoda confronts traditional approaches to fetishism by masquerading a woman as a man whose charm does not proceed from his masculine attributes. By de-romanticizing the phallus as a site of liberation, the novel makes way for a woman to appropriate ambiguity without desiring masculine characteristics that might confirm his externally inscribed masculine identity. Lowe’s simultaneous relationship with Omar and Joyce can be studied as both queer and normative. With Omar, though Lowe becomes the woman he longed to be, he does not restructure himself through the phallus as the subordinate figure in their relationship. Even when he masquerades the phallus in the presence of Joyce, I argue, he shows no sign of “virility [nor does he] exhibit masculine characteristics, both physical and mental” (Freud 10–11). In fact, abandoning the moustache endows him with a voice and agency that he is not able to exercise when he has to constantly check if his moustache has escaped (Powell, Pagoda 54). It is through these non-dichotomous performative forms that I argue Lowe contextualizes Caribbean sexual fetishism by appropriating the instability and crisis embedded within non-heterosexual desires. In my analysis of The Pagoda, I therefore decline to add Lowe to phallic theories or reduce his desires to meet the needs of a single-issue (non-intersectional) politics. Bringing into dialogue the significant roles of race and class in shaping sexual desire, I critique traditional perceptions of a “transcultural notion of patriarchy” (Butler 48) and elucidate those moments of tension in the text where the binaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between masculinity and femininity become difficult to define and control. Foregrounded in the discourse of the father, Lowe retains his social identity as a man, thereby making it difficult to envision a feminist intervention of The Pagoda in isolation from the power represented by the phallus. Therefore, in dialogue with the Symbolic, I expose the mechanisms through which hegemonic racial, class and cultural structures intersect to reproduce oppressive systems of violence while at the same time creating ambivalent bodies that desire and resist the social manifestations of traditional approaches towards sexual fetishism. In Powell’s novel, Lowe’s relationship with his “porcelain skin” (91) Afro-Caribbean wife Miss Sylvie and Indo-Caribbean Sharmilla and Joyce complicates the relationship between bodies and desires. Though each of these four women (if we recognize Lowe’s biological identity) reproduces some form of heterosexual relationship—performative or anatomical—each resists absolute assimilation to patriarchy. While Lowe is trapped in his role as the husband to Miss Sylvie that has turned him frigid, Sharmilla and Joyce never exhibit any marital desire towards either Mr. Kywing or Mr. Fine respectively. Not only do these Chinese, African and Indian bodies intersect in breaking the normative codes of desire, but the very existence of Lowe in his masculine form and the novel’s consistent use 44 of the pronoun “he” also belies the reduction of their desires to only homosexuality. The tension is conspicuous: through the mask of heterosexuality, the bodies participate in homosexual desires, thus reinforcing inter/intra race, gender and sexual crisis in the region. For example, Lowe, tormented by the pain of thirty years of silence with Miss Sylvie and the thought that he cannot reciprocate her “undying affection” (29), dreams of gratifying his sexual thirst for her early in the novel:

One night he had a dream … and when he woke up he was frightened to find her lying there next to him and even more alarmed to find that his spindly arm was trapped underneath her wide shoulders.… He had never seen a beauty like this and so close up to him and so overwhelmingly feminine and ripe and bursting it confused him. Frightened him, really. (110) Lowe’s fear and confusion are a response to the memory of a body and the desires that it can generate, which he cannot, under present circumstances, consciously acknowledge as his own or feel able to legitimately express. Even though his disguised body has allowed him to survive in the society, it has offered little comfort when in the company of Miss Sylvie. What is more alarming for Lowe is to “find that his spindly arm [is] trapped underneath her wide shoulders.” Lowe’s inability to enjoy the “feminine and ripe” beauty of Miss Sylvie, which undoubtedly he yearns for but cannot participate in, stems partially from his fetishizing the male appearance and investing it with a form of power that in reality (s)he lacks. The recurring, haunting memory of heterosexual violence he experienced from both his father and Cecil has debilitated any sexual desire that Lowe might have towards Sylvie or anyone else. Seen from this perspective, one might think about how Lowe would have responded in the absence of the masquerade. Instead of facilitating desire, why does “being the phallus” act as an impediment for Lowe? All of Lowe’s intimacies, as Francis notes, are “interethnic and suggest alternative ways of forming family, community, and belonging” (37). However, in this context Sylvie’s whiteness and Lowe’s masculinity—both fetishized—deter their union. Powell later repeats Lowe’s desire for Sylvie, but with a difference. We see Lowe expressing his secret yearning “for her embrace” but, as above, resisting indulging in his passions—“not moving, not rising to her touch or to touch her, not returning her kisses” (113). Overwhelmed by fear again, Lowe further withdraws to his (her) own self. I find Lowe’s reflection of this sexual tension particularly interesting, as it reveals a complex negotiation between his own masculine identity and feminine self: “For who is to say she wouldn’t fold up her fantasies into him and turn him further into something he wasn’t, as his father had done and then Cecil?” (114). Lowe is desperate to preserve the body that his father rejected when he turned thirteen and entered puberty (98). That same body was repeatedly raped and rejected by Cecil, thus compelling him to seek safety in the guise of a man. Having time and again been a victim of deceit and betrayal, Lowe’s biggest fear is to be turned further into something that he is not. His body therefore is his only hope that one day he will be able to return to an identity that has been denied to him since he was a little girl. Though Lowe plays the role of Miss Sylvie’s husband, he does not reproduce the phallus. Instead, well aware of the split between the body he possesses and the identity he performs, Lowe knows how to occasionally tap into his masculine facade to have Miss Sylvie donate money to help him complete the construction of his pagoda. By strategically negotiating with the phallus, he offers a self-criticism of what he represents: “For wasn’t this the way men got what they wanted? First by seduction and, if that didn’t work, then by force” (79). By highlighting “seduction” and “force”—traits he knows he lacks—Lowe distances himself from the image he represents while at the same time he appropriates 45 that image to expose the violence attached to a hegemonic masculine discourse. One might assume that Lowe’s jealous reaction to seeing Sylvie with her lover Whitley confirms a phallocentric discourse even though he tries hard “not to be possessive” towards Sylvie: “Look, you place is here with me. You hear that” (94). Even then, Lowe is aware that he is not the phallus nor does he represent it. Lowe’s performance as an authoritative dominant husband falls apart when his words fail to produce any effect on the two lovers: “They both looked drugged with love, and neither one paid him the smallest regard” (93). Marginalized and filled with shame, he rushes away with tearful eyes, reconfirming his inability to initiate love or authority from his phallic masquerade. As discussed above, the phallus again intervenes in his participation in what he witnesses as something “sharper and wetter and hotter” between Sylvie and Whitley (93). Instead of empowering Lowe, “being” the phallus stifles him and makes him invisible. The departure of Miss Sylvie however alters Lowe’s life in significant ways. In her presence, Lowe feels imprisoned, her company a constant reminder to him of his disguises, his Chinese identity, her whiteness and his latent desires. Lowe articulates Francis’s analysis of The Pagoda as an antiromance, where migrating to Jamaica offers little hope for him when compared to his life in China. When Miss Sylvie leaves after Lowe’s catastrophic blunder of attempting to reunite her with her estranged son Le Roy, for which she never forgives him, Lowe’s symbolic hermaphroditic form—feminine self forcibly garbed in a masculine identity—for the first time acquires the power to confront the crisis that has consumed him for years. If Miss Sylvie’s whiteness reinforced structures of racial superiority over Lowe’s Chineseness, here in her absence he becomes the female fetishist exercising power and critiquing popular perceptions from his own fractured identity. In pain and desperation, he admits to Omar who he really is: “You know I’m a woman” (220). There are many moments earlier in the text when he has been overcome by the urge to peel off his “ridiculous mustache” and vow “never to wear it again” (24). He has also tried, though in the confines of his room, to hide and take care of the body of which he was always taught to be ashamed. For instance, when he falls sick from the lump on his breast, he refuses to visit any doctor and instead “each morning, with cautious fingers… nurse[s] the lump, mollifying it with the exotic oils and herbal potions” that he asks Dulcie to procure for him (166). At another time, soon after learning the truth that it was Omar who burned down his shop, a heartbroken Lowe starts to feel uncomfortable with the lies and deceptions that circumscribe his life. In the privacy of his room, his indulgence in self-love grows, which paves the way for his later rejection of the masquerade: “he had taken to removing more frequently the cloth from his chest … each time he unpinned the hooks … he was always surprised to see that they were still there, shiny pink apricots showing their red-stained nipples … he lifted one tiny breast delicately and savored the warm pulp on its underside” (166). His association of his breasts with the fruit imagery of “shiny pink apricots” and “warm pulp” partially initiates Lowe into a postcolonial journey with a body that he has hesitated to reveal even to himself for years. In the absence of Miss Sylvie, Lowe realizes that his role as her husband does not hold true anymore. Unburdened, he feels free. In his obsession with Sylvie, he starts dressing up like her and for the first time “[begins] to love her” (223). Mimicry of Miss Sylvie does not culminate in a romance. However, through painting, he attains self-discovery in ways he never experienced before:

Maybe now when Miss Sylvie came to his bed he wouldn’t have to run, searching for shoes and slipping through rooms. He had found voice. Now he would put her hand gently to his cheek, kiss the tips of her burning fingers, and try to calm the jumbled images in his mind so his chest returned to his normal conundrum of sounds, his limbs unlocked, his shoulders softened. (236) 46

What we hear in this passage is a voice that has finally acquired the power to “calm the jumbled images” of desires often thought to be inappropriate and illegitimate. Devoid of fear and pretension, Lowe feels relaxed and composed. He no longer has to run and hide from who he really is. The shift within Lowe is striking and crucial in understanding sexual fetishisms in a Jamaican context. By now wishing to receive Sylvie’s “damp” “little butterfly kisses,” and in return to touch her “big nose” and “octoroon cheeks” (237), Lowe’s imagination opens up a postcolonial space for understanding complex materialized, sexualized interracial bodies in Jamaica: ‘Sylvie,’ he would moan, and she would ease off him a little and jab with the finger the tip of her breast that was the hidey, the one she claimed he had never seen...And he would break down there, just laughing and the tears trickling, and she’d smother him again with the butterfly touches, and this time when she entered his mouth, it wasn’t a cold wiggly fish choking him and locking off his breath, it was Sylvie, his Sylvie, loving him and drinking him and tasting him and swallowing him, his Sylvie with the darting tongue, his copper bird. (237) On the one hand, the sexually intimate moment with Miss Sylvie, reinforced through the modal auxiliary verb “would,” suggests an expression of a desire that he was never able to execute in his thirty years of marriage with her. On the other hand, though we see a liberated Lowe who wholeheartedly yearns to be with Miss Sylvie, the presence of the “would” is also a reminder that it is an unfulfilled desire, a deferred dream, which is yet to take place in reality. The crisis intrinsic to fetishism still exists. However, what distinguishes the above quotation from the previous sexual moments is that here, as a female fetishist, Lowe, through “laughing,” smothering, and moaning, actively participates in the imaginary act of love that he once denied to himself. The rhetorical shift from the past to present is conspicuous. What had earlier appeared as a “cold wiggly fish choking him” now becomes “his Sylvie, loving him.” Here, he allows himself to be cared for, loved and desired, which he could not do in his role as the man in Sylvie’s life. A feminist intervention allows the novel’s use of the possessive noun in “his Sylvie,” thereby foregrounding a sense of belonging and identification that attempts to bridge the political mission of both male and female sexual-minority organizations in Jamaica mentioned earlier. Further, the above passage celebrates not only a homoerotic relationship but also an interracial homoerotic relationship between a white-appearing Afro-Caribbean woman and a Chinese woman, both displaced victims of racial and sexual violence. What is also striking in the above quotation is that even though Lowe joins in the laughter with Sylvie, the pronoun “he” embedded throughout acts as a reminder of non-heteronormative desires anchored in and not separated from heterosexual discourse. This corroborates the fact that, though the bodies here are of two women, they are in conversation with the phallus, if not with a phallocentric discourse. Lowe, however, addresses his painful memory in an ambiguous way: while the possessive noun “his Sylvie” is a subtle reminder of the oppressive power of the phallus that Lowe has experienced from his father and Cecil, it also suggests that a rejection of patriarchy does not always necessarily have to mean a rejection of the phallus. Female sexual fetishism dislodges the centrality of the phallus by shifting the gaze from the “he” to the “she.” However, by reinforcing the presence of the masculine pronoun and by strategically reorienting towards the female body, The Pagoda celebrates Lowe as the female fetishist serving as a metaphor for transnational racial, gender and sexual crisis. Until Lowe’s wish is fulfilled and the Caribbean legitimizes the relationship between Lau A-yin and Miss Sylvie, the crisis will continue, and Lowe will remain trapped in his ambiguous identity as “ma’am, Mr. Lowe” (241). 47

The Pagoda creates forms of postcolonial sexual fetishisms that extend traditional psychoanalytic representations to offer new conversations with the feminine self. By making visible what is assumed to be absent, insignificant and passive, The Pagoda’s non-linear structure allows non-normative desires— between men, women, histories, places and agencies—to construct communities of pagodas, legitimate social structures based on solidarity and sexual subjectivities. What we see here is a shift from the phallocentric discourse of fetishism. Lowe decentres the power of the phallus and redirects attention to female desires that focus on male as well as female bodies, thus forging a continuity instead of a binary between the two. Earlier, in the presence of Miss Sylvie, Lowe was often drawn to fetishize masculinity. Now in her absence, as a female fetishist, he reorients power and perception to his need. There are two occasions when Lowe overpowers Cecil and Omar, highlighting not just the unstable nature of the phallus, but also its dependence on the fetishist: first, when Cecil rips Lowe’s “khaki shirt” and makes fun of his “skinny woman’s chest,” Lowe pounces on Cecil twisting “the pipe in Cecil’s skinny throat, determined to unhook the Adam’s apple” (100). Unlike the time in the ship, when he was no match for Cecil’s power, here, “beneath Lowe’s hands, Cecil battle[s] for air … [and] struggle[s]” (101). Second, after learning from Sylvie that it was Omar who burnt down his shop, Lowe, in a fit of rage, catches Omar off guard, knocking him out with a “glittering knife … at his throat” (161). Weakened, Omar turns pale from fear. Both these scenes reinforce Lowe’s power in performative masculinity and disrupt the dichotomy between “being” and “having” the phallus. If earlier he failed to exercise his phallic power with Sylvie and Whitley, in these two scenes his form and performance carve a Caribbean form of sexual fetishism that disrupts the perpetuation of patriarchal violence. Negotiation with the phallus becomes more explicit when we analyze Lowe’s altered relationship with Joyce. A married woman with three children, Joyce is a frequent visitor to Lowe’s shop, often giving him company during the hot summer afternoons. For years, Lowe was Joyce’s confidante, silently listening to her stories of depression and anxiety, and details of her sex life with Mr. Fine, her husband. Even though Lowe never actively participated in the conversation, he looked forward to every Monday and Thursday, when he found it difficult to ignore “her moist eyes,” “the great deluge of her breasts ... [and the] gleaming dark of her velvet skin” (59). The sexual tension between Lowe and Joyce echoes throughout the text. However, as the novel progresses, there is a shift in Lowe’s attitude towards his own sexual desires for Joyce. He moves from being a passive receiver to an active participant who no longer hesitates or is afraid of his latent desires. For example, Lowe remembers how when on one of her visits to the shop, Joyce suddenly kissed him on his lips “his breathing ... stopped ... and his tongue lay clogged in the wide-open door of her mouth, while hers darted and burrowed, and slivered and cornered” (59). Instead of enjoying the moment, his mind was then preoccupied with the thought of his daughter Elizabeth, “the quivering edges of his mustache,” a black cat that crossed, and a robin that flew. He was with Joyce and yetnot with her. After Miss Sylvie leaves, Lowe visits Joyce again, but we notice a difference. Here we see Lowe agreeing to come to terms with his own repressed self, Lau A-yin, and in turn consciously engaging with his (her) own desires for Joyce. Conversation replaces fear. By refusing to romanticize Lowe’s body— “ashy knees,” “sagging stomach,” “his sweat”—and instead focusing on his feminine beauty—“You beautiful”—Powell elevates the almost fifty-year-old body of Lowe from its deprived position in gender hierarchy. In the presence of Joyce, Lowe starts to see himself differently for the first time. Having never made love to Sylvie in his forty years of marriage with her, Lowe admits his ignorance when Joyce insists that he “Make love to [her]” (229–30). Lowe’s reply, “I don’t know ... I just don’t know,” again disrupts the power of the phallus, which is assumed to be always dominant and aggressive. By revealing his female body, female fetishist Lowe unsilences narratives of oppression and ceases to become the 48 passive, absent figure of traditional fetish discourses. Harrison notes that “with Joyce, it is a discovery of the more nurturing and considerate aspect of intimacy” (10) which, I argue, encourages Lowe to appropriate his unique hermaphroditic form to disrupt the power of the phallus by turning it against itself. Remembering how his masquerade had on many occasions acted as an obstacle to his desire rather than a facilitator of it, he rejects it. The experience is transcendent: Years later, he would always remember that afternoon and how she had turned him into a garden of flowers and fruits. How she had made up a name for his slim and ashy ankles, for every inch of his strong broad feet, for each toe, which she sprinkled first with kisses before assigning them titles. His fists had become her flowering hibiscus, his elbows her marigolds, his breasts her star apples, his nipples her guineps, his knees her frangipani, his calves her turtleberry bush, his navel her iris, and down there, down there, how to call it, her tulip? (Powell, Pagoda 230) In contrast with the previous scene, where he felt choked and suffocated, here we see Lowe discard his “offending swaddling band” and participate with Joyce in celebrating his feminine body and giving voice to his long-suppressed desires. The “hibiscus,” “marigolds,” “star apples,” “guineps,” “frangipani,” “turtleberry bush,” “iris” and “tulip” facilitate a deeper and profound identification with his own nature, thereby helping him to connect with the tropical beauty of Jamaica. By having Lowe sexually celebrate his identification with Joyce in Jamaica, Powell successfully constructs a Jamaican feminist discourse on sexual citizenship that provides agency for the marginalized, oppressed and invisible bodies in the Caribbean. While Lowe’s relationship with Joyce alters the hegemonic status of the phallus, the novel further complicates this negotiation in its exploration of Lowe’s relationship with Omar. Much like Lowe, Omar too threatens institutionalized heterosexuality. For Powell, as Timothy Chin describes, the common experience of solidarity and identity with place also extends to address common “sensibilities, dispositions, and … desires” (535). The mutual attraction between Lowe and Omar inaugurates this unique perspective of solidarity within the discourse of Caribbean sexual fetishism. Heterosexual desires are a constant presence in The Pagoda. Omar reminds Lowe of a time when as a teenager Lowe used to feel his “skin rising and rising” (27) each time the eyes of men moved on him. Lowe’s androgynous appearance—neither masculine nor feminine—is also echoed in Omar. For example, on their trip together in the forest, Lowe keenly observes Omar’s body and sees that he “did not sprout hairs on his chin or on his narrow … chest” (117). He also notices that Omar, who lives with his mother and who has fathered no children, has a “blue-black skin … of the smoothest complexion,” “soft … feminine hands” and a “serpentine movement” (119). In many possible ways, Omar’s body defies masculinity. Therefore, when Lowe sees Omar unbuckle his belt and flog one of his workers who could be of his age or older, Lowe does not fail to notice his tired look, his flinching eyes, trembling lips and the “beads of perspiration [that] gathered on the crown of his head” (121). In the same way in which Lowe’s masculine masquerade tethers him down, Omar too feels burdened by the social expectations placed on him for being a man. The binary between “being” and “having” the phallus again is threatened. Biologically or otherwise, both Omar and Lowe perform poorly in their role as men. What is interesting is that it is to Omar alone that Lowe confides his true identity: “You know I’m a woman” (220). It is again Omar who tells Lowe that just as he has no moustache there is no need for Lowe to wear one too because without it he “definitely [looks] more attractive” (124). I argue that it is Omar, and not Joyce or Sharmilla or Miss Sylvie, who facilitates Lowe’s confrontation with his past 49 and fosters the construction of a feminist interpretation of sexual fetishism. As Lowe “unbutton[s] his shirt” and reveals to Omar who he really is, we witness in him an authority that unsettles Omar. Not ashamed of his body any more, Lowe is filled with hate towards the facade he was made to wear: “…Look at me,” Lowe howled, tearing at the mesh merino, tearing at the swaddling band, plucking at the knobby nipples of his breasts, soothing the thin wisps of fur at his groin. “All these years … Stuck there … My father’s child. My father’s son. Can’t bear to become the girl he hate. The girl that disappoint him. Can’t bear … Hell is never facing that thing about you your father hate.” (221) This scene is intensely symbolic. By returning to the memory of the father and at the same time rejecting the identity produced by the father, Lowe not only destabilizes patriarchal structures that dictate gender arrangements but also gives agency to bodies that have been taught to “hate” themselves by a patriarchal discourse. His actions therefore—tearing, plucking, soothing—each reflects an emotion pertinent to its role. For instance, while he tears apart the merino and the swaddling band that has been wrapped around his chest for forty years, he “plucks” at his nipples, trying to force them out of a chest that he was made to hide. His “soothing the thin wisps of fur at his groin” symbolizes his acknowledgment of the beauty of the feminine body and legitimization of female desire—both heterosexual and homosexual—which would not have been possible in the roles assigned to him by his father or Cecil. Rose and Mitchell suggest the need of a form outside the feminine body that would contest the phallus; here, Lowe’s affiliation with her feminine self becomes possible through the symbolic form—Lowe–Lau A-yin—that emerges as the female fetishist de-essentializing gender in his attempts to systematically destabilize colonial discourses of bodies, borders and binaries. Analyzing Lowe and Omar’s sexual intimacy in the context of a heterosexual discourse further complicates the role of female desire in non-normative relationships. Following Sylvie’s departure, the relationship between Omar and Lowe intensifies. On one occasion, Lowe makes Omar “remove the merino” and slowly allows himself to be consumed by his desire: He did not want to face him, he did not want to read the astonished eyes, he did not want to kiss him, he did not want to talk to him. There was the organ between them, the throbbing hard thing between them. With stubby fingers Omar drew circles on Lowe’s back” [till Lowe falls fast asleep]. (226) Though Omar’s touch soothes Lowe, he needs assurance that instead of being in “a ship” with Cecil and “bruised wrists,” he is with Omar, who now with love and care “spoon[s] him soup” (226). When Omar again joins Lowe underneath the sheets, instead of forcing “the hot hard thing between them,” he rests it on Lowe’s hip where it “linger[s] … [until the] untapped desire between them…ebbs[s] and Omar tuck[s] it away” (226). By foregrounding a “politics of intimacy” and denying “normative coupling” (Francis 2,6), Powell claims an inclusive politics “of racial, gendered, or sexualized notions of Caribbean subjectivity” (Harrison 3). The contrast between Cecil and Omar, reinforced through the memory of the bruises and the sight of the soup, reconfigures Lowe’s association with the phallus. While we witness an anatomically heterosexual relationship, both the presence of the pronouns “he” and Omar’s reluctance to fulfill his sexual desire leads us to two things: first, Omar’s relationship with Lowe confirms and gives credence to unacknowledged desires between men in Jamaica; and second, by not allowing Omar to fulfill his desire, Powell highlights the importance of mutual pleasure in a relationship between two performatively queer bodies. Omar’s feminine disposition unsettles “institutionalized heterosexuality” (King 65) and actively disengages from the idea of Caribbean 50 citizenship as embedded in a gender-conforming male identity. By bringing together Omar and Lowe, Powell’s literary space provides agency to invisible bodies that do not codify heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy, and instead defy and deny any social re/presentations of them. This leads us to the next question: if Joyce facilitates Lowe’s unleashing of his repressed desires, and if Lowe on multiple occasions has felt comfortable and sexually aroused in the company of Sharmilla, why does he decide not to visit Joyce any more, and why does he feel disappointed in seeing Sharmilla (233)? Why does he choose Omar over Joyce and/or Sharmilla? How does his relationship with Omar shape a decolonizing Caribbean discourse of sexual fetishism? Harrison argues that this acceptance/denial is rooted in each of their “approach[es] to his/her desire for Lowe’s body, and the partner’s racial designation” (9). Both Joyce and Sharmilla in some form or other reproduce a hierarchical heterosexual relationship, while Omar’s feminine disposition parallels Lowe’s performative masculinity. As Omar assumes the role of Lowe’s companion, Lowe recedes to the world of Miss Sylvie, thus supposedly overcoming the crisis between his sexual and gender identity. In many ways, the novel successfully unsettles the power of the phallus in productively diverse ways. Lowe rejects his masculine masquerade and starts indulging in a feminine appearance with long hair. The triangular relationship between Lowe, his occasional partner Omar, and his absent love Sylvie offers a new understanding of postcolonial structures of Caribbean sexual fetishism. The crisis eases but does not disappear from Lowe’s life. He imagines “his copper bird” “[l]oving … drinking … tasting … and swallowing him,” but it never happens as he is yet to be reunited with Sylvie. Lowe realizes that, much like him, Miss Sylvie too is a victim of racial, gender and sexual violence. As “badly wounded people” (144), they had no one besides each other. Sylvie knew it from the start; Lowe took time to learn. Though Lowe’s pagoda remains the title of “one of his father’s short stories” (41), thus not allowing the possibility of an absolute split from the father, the plan for a school and the construction of it is a decision that neither Lowe’s father nor Cecil made for him. In the words of Harrison, Lowe’s pagoda becomes for him “a recuperative space for the queer outsider, a distinct and physical manifestation of who he is amidst the masquerade that he is forced to assume to survive in a hostile foreign place” (8). Echoing Kamala Kempadoo’s assertion “that any examination of Caribbean sexuality cannot be conducted completely separate from gender” (qtd. in King 69), we witness strategic negotiation with masculinity by both Lowe and Omar. Through their feminine disposition and in spite of their social identity as men, they give agency to forms of female fetishism unrecognized in Lacanian and Freudian discourse. In addition, by performing domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning, Omar further destabilizes the socially inscribed gender codes firmly held in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The Pagoda creatively celebrates crisis and ambivalence. Not only does the novel challenge representations of woman as nothingness or lack or absence, but it also demonstrates the multiple and complex ways in which marginalized Jamaican women and men alter gender, sexual and even gay/ lesbian hierarchies. Female fetishism in postcolonial Jamaica subverts dominant voices to create spaces for the visibly invisible. Displaced and suppressed, Lowe resists the colonial “machinery of violent unwomaning” (Tinsley 10) and becomes the metaphorical vehicle for the Caribbean to initiate “new connections, affiliations, and identities” (Chin 541). In spite of Sylvie’s ardent plea to start a life together in another place—Belize City, Trinidad, Panama or even Australia—Lowe remains steadfast in his 51 dreams of constructing his pagoda in Jamaica and nowhere else. In deciding to remain in Jamaica and wait for his Sylvie, Lowe helps initiate an interracial, queer conversation that overcomes the either/or mode and voices the strength and visibility of Chinese Jamaican feminist interventions in Caribbean and Western understandings of sexual fetishism.

Works Cited Alexander, Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke UP, 2005.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Chin, Timothy. “The Novels of Patricia Powell: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Across the Disjunctures of the Caribbean Diaspora.” Callaloo, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 533–45, doi:10.1353/cal.2007.0209.

Chinee Girl. Directed by Natalie Wei, Natalie Wei Productions, 2011.

Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. Plume, 1996.

Francis, Donette. Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Basic Books, 2000.

Glave, Thomas, editor. Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing From the Antilles. Duke UP, 2008.

Harrison, Sheri-Marie. “‘Yes, Ma’am, Mr. Lowe’: Lau A-Yin and the Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–13, scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol7/iss1/7/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2018.

King, Rosamond S. Island Bodies. UP of Florida, 2014.

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Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night. Avon, 1999. 52

---. Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Penguin, 2014.

Powell, Patricia. The Pagoda. Knopf, 1998.

---. “(Re-)Constructing the Pagoda: A Conversation with Patricia Powell.” Interview by Stephen Narain. , smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/re-constructing-pagoda. Accessed 13 Feb. 2018.

Scott, Lawrence. Aelred’s Sin. Allison and Busby, 1988.

Shemak, April. “The Politics of Intimacy in Caribbean Women’s Fiction.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2012, pp.1–6, scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1220&context=anthurium. Accessed 11 Feb. 2018.

Smith, Faith, editor. Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean. U of Virginia P, 2011.

Steele, Valerie. Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power. Oxford UP, 1996.

Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. Thiefing Sugar. Duke UP, 2010.

Walters, Wendy M. “Archives of the Black Atlantic: Postcolonial Citation in The Pagoda.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 43, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 163–68, doi:10.1215/00295132-2009-077. 53

From Bastardness and Outsideness to Land/(E)/ Scape in The Pirate’s Daughter Candice A. Pitts

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/Naj94gRX9g4

Margaret Cezair-Thompson, a Jamaican by birth, is among the many Caribbean diasporic writers now residing in North America. Her first novel,A True History of Paradise: A Novel, was published in 1999, and The Pirate’s Daughter, on which this essay concentrates, was published in 2008. Although Cezair-Thompson writes from a position of “outsideness,” she is pre-occupied with the (re)telling of stories, the (re)shaping of history and the (re) forming of the Jamaican nation, particularly concentrating on the belonging, space and place of Jamaican women in these discourses. Indeed, The Pirate’s Daughter is set during the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, which witnessed the transition from colony to nation and the national crisis that occurred during Michael Manley’s years as prime minister. As such, the novel makes a critical intervention into national history and conceptualizations of nationhood, by helping us to unearth and understand how social class, race and ethnicity, and gender factor in an understanding of national belonging in Jamaica. 54

In the novel, the concepts of independence and nation become invidious social constructs defined by those in power—particularly wealthy, influential middle-class men. Parallel nationalist discourses occur on mainland Jamaica, led by male nationalist leaders, and on Navy Island, led by Hollywood actor Errol Flynn. The story of May Flynn, the titular character and daughter of Errol Flynn and Ida Joseph (who later marries the white Englishman Karl Vanausburg), is set against this nationalist backdrop. To understand the complexities of race and ethnicity vis-à-vis the conceptualization of nation in the novel, one needs to consider May’s colourful and multilayered lineage: her father, Errol Flynn, is white; her mother, Ida Joseph, was born in Jamaica to a Lebanese father, Eli Joseph, and an Afro-Asian mother with maroon lineage, Esme Sen-Choy; and her great grandmother, Oni Sen-Choy, is a maroon with prominent Asian ancestry. Errol Flynn does not claim May as a biological daughter, which makes her refer to herself as a “bastard”; and her European features earn her the epithet of “other Jamaican,” which makes her feel like someone on the “outside,” not “belonging anywhere,” both within her family and her nation (307). (Importantly, the colonial state of Jamaica omitted certain kinds of people in its official accounting, such as “bastards,” until Michael Manley adjudicated concerns of illegitimacy by passing the Bastard Act of 1972). As a representation of mixed-race Jamaicans in post-1960s Jamaica, May feels a keen sense of displacement, and this is ironic in a country that advocates recognition of its heterogeneity, as evident in the national motto “Out of Many, One People.” In this essay, I contend that May Flynn’s search for her identity within Jamaica engenders creative appropriations, subversion and resistance. Indeed, her positionality as a “bastard,” as someone on the outside, allows May to reposition herself in the polity of Jamaica and provides space for her to reconceptualize and redefine “nation” itself, as evident in her neologism “landscapism” (307). Cezair- Thompson’s novel therefore points to an alternative way of conceptualizing nation, which is contrary to the hegemonic representation of nation that continues to marginalize particular groups of peoples based on their race, ethnicity, class and gender (in this case, women). Critics and scholars have directed attention to Cezair-Thompson’s literary works, but mostly to her first novel,The True History of Paradise. For instance, Sam Vasquez’s “Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex, Sexuality, and Race in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise,” Rachel Mordecai’s essay on Cezair-Thompson’s True History of Paradise and Robert Antoni’s Carnival, and Carmen Gillespie’s essay on Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise all address issues of identity, sex and race in Cezair-Thompson’s first novel. However, there is a paucity of research on The Pirate’s Daughter, aside from book reviews by Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Leah Creque-Harris, Dana Cobern-Kullman, and Bob Minzesheimer, and Karina Smith’s essay “‘These Things not Marked on Paper’: Creolisation, Affect and Tomboyism in Joan Anim-Addo’s Janie, Cricketing Lady and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The Pirate’s Daughter.” My article attempts to generate critical discourses on this text, by revealing how it advances an empowering conceptualization of illegitimacy and of land vis-à-vis a definition of nation. I therefore situate my discussion of The Pirate’s Daughter in discourses that address Jamaican nationalism and the positionality of women in these discourses; hence, my research engages and adds to the scholarship of Leah Rosenberg, Curdella Forbes, Alison Donnell, Carole Boyce Davies, Elaine Fido, Evelyn O’Callaghan and others. The argument that informs the theoretical framework of this essay is that “bastardness”–which May’s illegitimacy invokes—engenders an outside space that deconstructs and destabilizes hegemony and other dominant epistemological structures. In the larger Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, the 55 social attitude towards illegitimacy during the first half of the twentieth century was influenced by the churches’ condemnation of sex outside of marriage. Brian Moore and Michele Johnson aver in Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920, that in post-emancipation Jamaica, “the church considered sacred marriage a permanent institution of God prescribed by Holy Scripture, and it lost no opportunity to instruct its followers ‘to avoid fornication, [and] let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband’” (102). Furthermore, the ideal of legal Christian monogamous marriage was an integral part of an entire ideology of morality and civility; hence, attitudes towards illegitimacy were intertwined with notions of Christian virtues and honor. In particular, a woman’s sexual propriety was seen as evidence of her honor, and therefore, fornication and/or promiscuity were viewed as dishonorable. Moore and Johnson also indicate that children born out of wedlock in Jamaica were considered a “social evil” (115), “national sin” (117), “national disgrace” (121), “social problem” (121) and “social crisis” (123). The law reflected such social attitudes; in fact, civil and canonical laws discriminated against illegitimate children. In the Politics of Equality, Michael Manley affirms that “[f]or many, many years in Jamaica illegitimate children have been inferior of status in the law. If you are an illegitimate child, you cannot inherit under the inheritance law because you do not exist in terms of that law” (170-1). Legitimate children had significantly more rights than illegitimate ones, who were born from so-called “damaged unions.” These discriminatory and invidious attitudes persisted until Manley passed the Bastard Act in 1972, which abolished institutional discrimination against illegitimate children. Under the heading “Inheritance Law” in the Politics of Equality, Manley declares, We believe that every child born in this country is equal before God. Therefore, we are going to change the law to ensure that when you are born of man and woman in the island of Jamaica, you are not only equal in the sight of God but you are equal under the law. So that the status of illegitimacy will be abolished and all people will be equal. (171) While the law abolished systematic discrimination, social discrimination persisted. Legitimate children had a higher social rank than that of so-called bastards. “Bastards” were socially depicted as outsiders, as evident in the ascription of “his outside children”; they were often considered disreputable and seldom recognized. In fact, unlike fathers of legitimate children, fathers of illegitimate children had the choice to give or refuse “bastards” their surnames. In May’s case, however, (and in the cases of many other “bastards”) receiving the father’s surname is not necessarily favourable nor meaningful, as May bears Flynn’s surname but receives none of the benefits of legitimacy. In The Pirate’s Daughter, Cezair-Thompson draws on the political and social representations and implications of “bastards” in Jamaica. Her text exposes and interrogates the European imperial moral and civilizing project as well as fathers in absentia—both the local Jamaican men and the European men who fathered and left behind many “bastards.” In her “Conversation” with Marilyn Sides, Cezair- Thompson states, I was conscious of Flynn’s role as an absent father reflecting a larger kind of absenteeism, political and historic. Recurring throughout Jamaican history is a figure known as the absentee planter; he was a British owner of the sugar estates and a slave owner, lived most of the time in England but sometimes fathered mixed-race children born of his slaves [in Jamaica]. The children, and in many instances the plantations themselves, were abandoned when slavery ended. I was thinking of how much that’s part of our history, and of how 56

islands like Jamaica have been, like the character May, struggling to emerge from a very fragmented past. As Cezair-Thompson reveals, the illegitimate child (person and country) historically inhabits a position of anguish, subjugation, displacement and unbelonging. Consistent with the genealogy of resistance that characterizes the Caribbean, however, one can appropriate her representation of the “outsideness” of the “bastard” in the context of the novel as a space of agency from which those on the margins of the Jamaican society, and especially “bastards”, are written in the polity of Jamaica. Indeed, as a so-called bastard herself, May insinuates herself in this genealogy of resistance by defining being a “bastard” as being “outside” dominant epistemologies of identification and of belonging. She then explains further “that means I don’t belong anywhere,” while her mother, another “bastard” of mixed-race origins, replies, “it mean[s] you’re not shut in.… We wouldn’t have a country or history if it wasn’t for so-called bastards ... from way back we mix-matchin’ black, white, Chinese, Syrian, and every blinkin’ race” (273). The position of bastardness and outsideness not only speaks to May’s social and racial designation in Jamaica, but, as Cezair-Thompson implies, it also speaks to the global designation of African diasporic peoples, many of whom were forcefully taken from Africa, displaced during slavery and colonization, and are the descendants of black women who were raped by colonial authorities, and therefore, these peoples inhabit a comparable position of bastardness. Bastardness and outsideness also speak to the (voluntary or involuntary) migratory patterns of people from their motherlands to respective diasporas in the Caribbean in which they have to create new homes. Kamau Brathwaite deploys the concept of “marronage” to explain the positionality of these “displaced” peoples, particularly African diasporic peoples, in the Caribbean and their proclivity to “survive, adapt, and create something ‘new’”; in this case, a home (57). Based on Cezair-Thompson’s positioning of “bastards” against established and accepted epistemologies and social and political expectations in an attempt to create their own realities, I also argue that bastardness engenders characteristics of marronage. Intrinsically, marronage is accompanied by an element of flight, isolation, abandonment, homelessness, dislocation and resistance. This definition of marronage resonates with May’s and Ida’s implication that the bastard’s identity is constructed in a position of outsideness and that it engenders agency and movement. Indeed, as bastardness suggests illegitimacy, irregularity, outsideness and resistance, it also engenders fluidity, creativity, mobility and originality. By remaining outside conventional ways of thinking and outside established or legitimate ways of doing things, the “bastard” is open to a wider range of alternatives. It is this position of outsideness that grants May the agency to rethink what it means to be Jamaican and what the land means vis-à-vis her identity. This outsideness also enables her to conceptualize her neologism, landscapism, which defines belonging in Jamaica in a way that is inclusive and non-violent. In her own definition, May asserts that landscapism is “both a passion for the land and a kind of escape” (305). As such, landscapism promises inclusiveness, alternatives and possibilities to all, and particularly to those on the margins of nationalist discourses. As NourbeSe Philip postulates through her conceptualization of i-mage, there is resistance inherent in the act of renaming and redefining (43). In Cezair-Thompson’s novel, the identificatory relationship May forms with the land is intrinsically an act of resistance. Similarly, maroons have always resisted through their relationship with the land, which I will later develop in my discussion of May’s great grandmother, Oni the maroon. 57

The bastardness/outsideness of the titular character, May Flynn, has its genesis in her father Errol Flynn’s exploitation of Jamaica/“the land” and of Ida Joseph, May’s racially mixed Jamaican mother. The real-life Flynn was an Australian movie star, adventurer and womanizer of English, Irish and Scottish descent (although in Hollywood he referred to himself mostly as Irish). According to Thomas McNulty in Errol Flynn: The Life and Career, Flynn was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1909, but became a naturalized American citizen in 1942 (5). As an actor, he became an overnight sensation in his first starring role inCaptain Blood. He later starred in numerous other films, including The Prince and the Pauper (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940). His womanizing led to two separate allegations of statutory rape of Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee (incidents to which Cezair- Thompson alludes in her representation of his sexual relationships with the adolescent Ida Joseph and Brenda). Flynn’s seafaring brought him to Jamaica after his boat was washed ashore by a tropical storm. During the forties and fifties, he settled in Port Antonio, Jamaica, purchased Navy Island and allegedly helped to develop tourism in these areas by inviting celebrities and socialites, such as Marilyn Monroe, to the island. In his 2012 article in the Jamaica Observer, Everard Owen claims that “in the 1940s, the island was owned by renowned American movie star, Errol Flynn, and for a time was a playground for the rich and famous.” Flynn’s purchase of Navy Island factors tremendously in the ways he is incorporated in Jamaica’s economic and social politics. Ultimately, his access to land points to the economic and political value of land in Jamaica and the ways in which it helps to influence one’s sense of belonging. The epigraph on the opening pages of the novel invokes Flynn in a colonialist narrative by reminding us that “those innumerable groups of islands, keys and sandbanks, known as the West Indies … afforded a sure retreat to desperadoes.” Indeed, one can argue that similar to many other Euro-American adventurers, desperadoes and flotsam, who were able to make fortunes from their voyages to the West Indies, Flynn turns his shipwreck-adventure into a retreat. In her conversation with Marilyn Sides, Cezair-Thompson explains that she sees “his relation to the island as part of a historical attraction white Western males have had for the so-called unspoiled Tropics—Gauguin, Hemingway, Kipling, the Buccaneers, European explorers, the list goes on” (406). Flynn’s association with such Western white males is not farfetched, since, as McNulty indicates, Errol’s mother, “Lily Mary Young … was descended from Midshipman Edward Young who served aboard HMS Bounty with Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh” (5). The fact that Flynn is represented as a pirate in the novel also links him to the lawlessness and extraordinary liberties enjoyed by Europeans in the colonies. Flynn’s gesture of hoisting his pirate flag on Navy Island, Jamaica, suggests that the land is unclaimed and that he is claiming it in his own name, as evident in the opening line of the novel’s prologue: “The Island That Was Errol Flynn’s.” Claiming the land in his name resonates more with the exclusion that accompanied colonial conquistadors’ practice of claiming “new world” land in the name of the Crown than it does with any nationalist practice of inclusion. Consistent with the image of an explorer and conquistador, Flynn also upholds the European epistemology of conflating “new world” territory with a woman’s body, subject to exploration and domination. Jamaica, to Flynn, is “more beautiful than any woman I’ve known” (15), and to be exploited the way he exploits Ida. Identifying Ida as “exotic” and evaluating her worth in terms of the gratification of his sexual impulses fits conveniently into Flynn’s colonialist enterprises on Navy Island. Ida, despite her early magnificence—a girl cherished by her father and community because of her brown skin—is eventually reduced to the colonial stereotype of the “primitive” and naïve girl apt for exploitation and willing to 58 validate her colonizer by loving him, by serving his colonialist, masculine narcissism and by bowing to his power (as evident in the relations between La Malinche and Hernan Cortes in Mexico; Pocahontas and John Smith in the United States; and Joanna and John Stedman in ). Flynn impregnates both the land and the adolescent Ida, leaving Navy Island “developed,” Ida a single mother and May a “bastard” child. In every practical sense, the geopolitics of Navy Island, as constituted by Flynn, resonate with the concept of nation as an imagined political community. This definition of nation suggests that nation is neither natural nor self-evident, but that it is a social construct, which means that people of different persuasions and convictions determine the definition of a concept that then becomes the primary signifier of belongingness (Anderson). Indeed, although Navy Island exists within the geographical boundaries of Jamaica, Flynn’s island/“imagined community” functions—socio-culturally, economically and politically—outside Jamaica’s jurisdiction. He hosts many Hollywood parties and invites notable socialites and dignitaries, such as the fictional Ian Fleming, Nigel Fletcher, and Marilyn Monroe. This geopolitical disjunction immediately invokes the dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, the rich and poor, the “mainlanders” and the “islanders,” the “outsider” and the “insider,” the “us” and the “them.” The irony is that Ida Joseph and May Flynn, who were born in Jamaica and should benefit from, if nothing else, jus soli—more than Errol Flynn, who only purchases a piece of land he appropriates as his own nation—are made outsiders in their country of birth. Interestingly, however, a parallel exclusionary nationalist discourse takes place on mainland Jamaica. Ida reveals the divisions between local Jamaicans on the bases of race and class that reflect and inform the structure and image of the country. The class and racialized division is depicted in Ida’s own family between her Lebanese, middle-class father, who makes it possible for her to meet someone like Flynn, and her Afro-Asian-Jamaican mother, who emerged from a poor community. Indeed, Ida’s brown-skinned complexion and that of her father, Eli Joseph, align them with those whom Carolyn Cooper identifies as the “mixed-raced elites” of the 1960s. Ida reveals the ease with which their pigmentation gives them access to the country clubs, while her mother’s Afro-Jamaican appearance gains her “impolite stares” and awkward silence (60). Aware of the implications of race and class, Ida questions her own positionality in the polity of Jamaica. Where would she fit in—with the affluent white community, whom her father and Flynn represent, or with the poor blacks, whom her mother represents? Unable to make this determination, Ida sees herself as “a shell tossed every which way” (137). Her position on the power axis in Jamaica is complicated by the fact that she is both multiracial with prominent European features and associated with the lower class. Cezair-Thompson’s representation of race and class suggests that, even though the national motto advocates unity in spite of heterogeneity, the Jamaican nationalist movement is fraught with deficiencies, occlusions and contradictions. These problematics of national identification hark back to and draw on the debates on race and class that took place during the early phases of the nationalist movement between political rivals and early nationalists Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, who helped to inform how the concept of nation in the Jamaican context accounted for race and other indicators of national identity. Although these male nationalists’ anti-colonial and nationalist rhetoric theoretically advocated for autonomy, unity and identity, in a practical sense, the first phase of the movement was divided along the lines of colour and race. Bustamante (from the Jamaica Labour Party), who was well aware of the hostility between poor blacks and those that represented the establishment (which, ironically, he also represented), drew on the rhetoric of class and race and associated Manley and the People’s National Party with the upper classes. 59

One of Bustamante’s most damning political strategies was his indictment of Manley’s mixed-race appearance (though he himself was near white) and his association of Manley with white plantocracy, the old established order against which the masses were revolting. In Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion, Abigail Bakan argues that Bustamante “claimed that independence would mean ‘brown man rule,’ with the middle class in power installing a renewed system of slavery” (131). Bustamante’s intention was to trigger the memory of slavery and to imply that Manley stood on the side of the planters. In The Pirate’s Daughter, Cezair-Thompson suggests that the dialectic of colonialism and nationalism, as both Bustamante and Manley have ostensibly indicated, results in the adoption of certain invidious ideologies, particularly on race, which remain in the political system and inform the social stratifications and racial tensions in Jamaica well after independence. Indeed, in the novel, lower class, black Jamaicans repeat the racialized discourse by rejecting what they perceive as a racialized hierarchy: “‘brown man’s rule.’ That was what they called independence. They said ‘brown man’s rule’ would be no different from ‘white man’s rule.’ ‘Brown people,’ as they called the light-skinned, prosperous Jamaicans, had been lording it over poor black people like them for a long time” (236). Even though this has been the prevailing attitude some Jamaicans have had towards “brown people,” Michael Manley, in his ideology of democratic socialism, avers that Jamaicans should be “opposed to any form of racialism and opposed to the claim of any racial superiority, or advantage by natural right, over any other race” (31). As evident in Jamaicans’ racialist attitudes, however, brainwashing in a society that was once white-oriented has left scars that mar any possibility of people completely overcoming the hurdles posed by race and class, even within the context of national independence. Indeed, this problem of identification that brown-skinned Ida and her dark-skinned mother have from the 1940s to the 1960s would pose parallel problems for her daughter May in post-independence Jamaica. May’s lineage also classifies her as “mixed-race elite.” As noted earlier, her father, Errol Flynn, is white and, her mother, Ida, was born in Jamaica to a Lebanese father, Eli Joseph, and an Afro-Asian mother with maroon lineage, Esme Sen-Choy. It is important to note here that the identity of May’s great grandmother, Oni Sen-Choy, comprises its own complex layers of ancestry. Oni represents the maroons or runaway slaves of Jamaica, who formulated renegade communities in response to European slavery and imperial authorities. She also has Chinese Jamaican heritage and represents the indentured labourers of various ethnicities who also factor in any imagining of a Caribbean nation. Similar to Oni, May’s plural lineage is conflated and outweighed by her complexion (in May’s case, her brown skin), which is what society sees first, and which poses serious social concerns for her. The attitude towards race in the early 1970s, during a high time of black nationalism, was different than that in the 1960s. Whereas Ida’s brown skin became her passport to certain exclusive clubs, a person’s brown skin during the 1970s earns him or her mockery and rejection, or as May claims, designation as the “other Jamaicans” (251) or as “an enemy of the people” (295). May exemplifies the “outsideness” and marginalization a person of her complexion experiences in post-independence Jamaica, when she is abandoned by her mother (who migrates to New York in pursuit of economic opportunities subsequent to Flynn’s neglect of her and May) and her father (who lives a few miles away on Navy Island, from which she is excluded). She is forced to live in Ms. Georgia’s home in the “dirt yard on Parrot Lane,” in a community comprised of lower-class Jamaicans (143). May’s racial features, however, and the fact that she now lives in a poor, black community, make her doubly alienated: she is not visibly black, nor is she fully white. She cannot relate to her black peers and does not have the social status those of her racial composition usually enjoy. As such, May does 60 not “belong” to the black community, which names her a “white witch” (a descriptor that alludes to Antoinette from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, who is shunned by blacks and whites alike; and to the legendary Anne Palmer, fictionalized in Herbert G. de Lisser’s novel,White Witch of Rosehall, as a sadistic and lecherous woman); neither does May “belong” on Navy Island in Flynn’s imagined community. These respective racial communities, whose divisions make them metonymic of the racially stratified Jamaican nation, exclude May from the sanctioned polity. May’s problem of identification and belongingness is further compounded after Flynn’s death. May bears her father’s surname but accrues none of the legal entitlement that accompanies it and none of the benefits of a hyphenated identity as Jamaican-Australian-American (indeed, such an identity only problematizes issues of citizenship, especially in a country that is defining its national identity around the issues of race, class and gender). In fact, May states that “she couldn’t write her surname without feeling slightly fraudulent” (375). Her attitude is fitting, since Flynn does not bequeath Navy Island to May because she is a “bastard”; instead, Karl Von Ausberg—“one of the executors of [Flynn’s] estate” (214)—marries May’s mother, Ida. This legal proceeding subsequently grants May access to Navy Island. Her reception on Navy Island, however, holds constant reminders of why she was hitherto excluded. Karl and Ida maintain Navy Island’s “mix of California ranch and Spanish colonial” architecture and infrastructure, which suggests that the island continues to function under Flynn’s epistemologies. Since May is yet an adolescent, Ida and Karl are culpable for inserting her into the pre-existing socio-cultural and political structures of Flynn’s imagined community that continue to have bearings on her sense of belonging. Even though May entertains ideas of pirate flags, pirate language and pirate maps on the island, she is reminded by her white boyfriend, Martin (who refuses to marry her), that she does not belong in Flynn’s hegemonic setting. May attributes his rejection to the differences between their races and suggests to her mother that in much the same way “my father who was white didn’t marry you … and the white man who was my grandfather … did not marry my black grandmother … Martin [did not marry me] because of color” (27). The fact that May continues to feel a sense of rejection by those who seek to perpetuate the domination of metropolitan Europe in her country that is struggling for its independence indicates that, despite Flynn’s death, the structures of his pre-organized, imagined community, visible and invisible, continue to foster racialized epistemologies. Flynn influences May’s identity formation not only within Jamaica, but beyond its borders as well. When she moves to Switzerland at age seventeen, May indicates the extent to which gendered and racialist terms determine her identity there. Afro-descendants in Switzerland refer to her as a “half- caste” (299), and whites refer to her as “la femme noir” (307). Indeed, her white boyfriend pointedly tells her, “you look just like Flynn but you are a Negress” (307). May’s heterogeneity forces her to occupy and negotiate multiple “in-between” and “outside” spaces geographically, nationally, culturally, ideologically and racially. The series of border crossings she is forced to make are consistent with the theorization of bastardness—an epistemological space that reflects aspects of illegitimacy, irregularity, outsideness and dubiousness. The paradox inherent in this “bastard” position is that its “outsideness” allows May the flexibility she needs to manoeuvre in the cross-cultural, national and geopolitical spaces she inhabits, reconceptualize her belongingness in the Jamaican national imaginary and challenge the hegemonic constructions of “nationness.” As a woman negotiating cross-cultural spaces, May is similar to Cezair-Thompson herself, who writes from a diasporic position in North America and, arguably, from a comparable space of 61

“illegitimacy,” but uses this designation to address her belongingness in Jamaica and to help divine the future of a country she loves. In her conversation with Marilyn Sides, affixed to her novel, Cezair- Thompson states: Of all the characters, I probably have most in common with May especially in terms of her literary nature and her feelings for Jamaica. I empathize with the struggle to find her own voice, her sense of belonging and not belonging, loving a country and not being sure where she quite fits in. In the novel, May returns to Jamaica at age nineteen after her sojourn in Europe with an augmented sense of nationalism and political and social activism, which suggests that she had to step outside, literally, in order to reposition herself. May intimates her political desires to Nigel, her European/ Jamaican boyfriend (and the ostensible fictional representation of Ian Fleming): “enough of this citizen- of-the-world crap. Time to be a citizen of my country now” (307). She intends to create her space of belonging by investigating Jamaica’s invidious nationalist movement. On her return, May becomes disillusioned by a version of nationalism in Jamaica that displaces a “poetics of equality” that Michael Manley, the new prime minister, advocates. May, as do other Jamaicans, accuses male nationalists of destroying the country: “Dem no know how fe run de country. Look how dem mash-up de place” (312). Not only does she suggest that the movement is divided along the lines of colour and race, “brown” versus “black,” but she also indicates that women are now political victims and are raped, murdered and taken as spoils by those with political affiliations. During the general elections, May hears stories on the news where “mothers beg gunmen to take them instead of their daughters” (339) as political prisoners. The reports from Kingston upset May so much that she “stop[s] reading the newspapers and would switch off the radio” (339). According to May, there are so many stories of rape that it seems the “country were at war against women” (339); this statement immediately implicates the Jamaican government in the violence women endure, especially since intrinsic in the concept of the state is the monopoly on (il)legitimate violence. For May, the violence against women is a significant indicator of the way the nation-state is conceptualized and the way it views women. Cezair-Thompson’s representation of violence in her novel is important on several levels. Not only does she represent violence as a tragic element of the state, but she zooms in on the effects of the political, systematic and domestic violence against women. Cezair-Thompson’s father, Dudley Thompson, was the area representative of the West Kingston constituency, which was at the heart of the violent political and gang wars in Jamaica during the 1970s. In 1978, when he was the minister of defense in the PNP administration, Thompson identified violence as Jamaica’s number one problem; but ironically, as Terry Lacey indicates in Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 1960–70, Thompson himself was implicated in the corruption of the political culture (49). Even Cezair-Thompson ostensibly positions her novel against her father’s administration by highlighting the socio-cultural and political violence that unfolded during his political era, which calls him into question in much the same way she criticizes the Jamaican government. Ultimately, Cezair-Thompson exposes the most extreme acts of racial and gendered violence perpetuated and condoned in Jamaica during the 1970s. Cezair-Thompson’s preoccupation with violence is manifested in the ways violence is duplicated in both her novels; indeed, her representation of social and political violence in Jamaica in her first novel mirrors the representation in her second novel. The narrator in The True History of Paradise states, 62

Every day the newspapers reported rapes and killings by the gunmen. No one knew exactly who or what the gunmen were. At times they were described as ‘armed guerrillas’ or ‘militia groups,’ yet they had demonstrated no clear purpose…. (204) … The home of Mr. Chin, the grocery shop owner, was broken into, after they raped his wife and mother in front of him, the gunmen hacked off a limb from each of them. A school girl who lived across the street from Daphne was at home with the maid when the gunmen arrived, raped them, tied them up, and set fire to the house. It went on and on like this…. (205) As Carmen Gillespie argues, the turbulence and brutality of the political climate are mapped onto the bodies of women (149). With these representations of rape, Cezair-Thompson importantly broadens the agenda of women’s situatedness during the social and political moment, enacts an important unsilencing of violence against women in the nation and brings the nation-state under critical review. In her conversation with Marilyn Sides, Cezair-Thompson admits that “it isn’t easy to write about sexual violence. I try to give a truthful and realistic sense of what occurs without violating the reader’s sensibilities.” Her representation of both Ida and her daughter May, in The Pirate’s Daughter, draws on women’s and girls’ various encounters with sexual violence; Courtney Hart would eventually rape the adult Ida (123), while a group of boys would threaten to rape the pubescent May (181–83). May, who defends herself against the boys (unlike Ida in similar occurrences), becomes a conduit through which Cezair-Thompson redresses the violence and reflects the advancing political awareness of women who convey concerns for socially and politically oppressed women and marginalized racial groups. This instance of militant womanism, manifested by the socially and politically conscious female characters in the novel, coincides with the feminist movement that also emerged during the 1970s in Jamaica and in which Beverly Manley, Michael Manley’s wife, was very instrumental. The concept of nation-state for May, despite its political ideologies of unity, autonomy and equality (as evident in Michael Manley’s democratic socialism), becomes the framework within which gendered and cultural minorities witness and experience inequalities and indignities on a daily basis. As a social construct that fails to prevent violence against women and that both encourages and enables socio-cultural hierarchies and occlusions of particularized peoples, nation-state for May becomes a pejorative word. May therefore undermines the very concept of nation-state by making a distinction between the land—her natural habitat—and the nation-state created by those in power. In one of her letters to Nigel, May intimates, “I’ve always been madly in love with the land of my birth—the land, not the nation or state—it’s not patriotism; it’s landscapism, which is both a passion for the land and a kind of escape” (305). But while May attempts to sacralize the land in her anti-nation-state project, the ideology of landscapism has ironically been integral to empire building and then subsequently to independence and nation building. Undoubtedly, “New World” land has been central to colonial and imperial enterprises. Equated with the bodies of women, the land was charted, exploited and brought under control. Original inhabitants, such as the Tainos, Caribs and Mayans, of these New World territories were also exploited and destroyed, much like the land, to facilitate colonial objectives. However, whereas humans were annihilated, the land remains a witness of the ongoing legacy of colonial brutality. In Whole Armour, Wilson Harris claims that the Caribbean is “a landscape saturated by traumas of conquest” (8). Colonial conquests have made the land as “othered” as people (such as May) who have been dispossessed and made bastards. 63

Considering the colonial representation of the land, then, how can land, ravaged by the violence of history, be recovered? In his essay “The Music of Living Landscape,” Wilson Harris observes that there is silent music in the landscape of the Caribbean, but that we must understand the alphabets of submerged histories, stories and languages, to process this music: “The landscape possessed a life, because, the landscape for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which we worked was all around me. But it takes time to really grasp what this alphabet is, and what the book of the living landscape is” (40). With her ideology of landscapism, Cezair-Thompson attempts to understand these alphabets. The very act of proposing an alternative name for “nation” references the deconstructive premise of what NourbeSe Philip terms i-mage—the ability to create a language to voice that which was silenced. The landscape has been a witness of history; it has always been singing in a voice that is silent. Landscapism is a means to understand what Wilson Harris refers to as a “silent roar” (42). The maroons have since determined and realized their “languages” to understand the land, which is an important symbol in maroon communities. Prior to the Maroon Treaties of 1740 and 1793, maroons owned and controlled portions of land in Jamaica; this was mostly in the mountainous interior of the island, as indicated by Nanny’s declaration in Vic Reid’s Nanny Town: “the mountains are ours!” (84). The land was their home and protector, and the maroons protected the land in turn, making it difficult for the colonial authorities to penetrate. Maroons studied the land; knowledge of the terrain, plant, and animal life was crucial to their guerrilla warfare. According to Colonel C.L.G. Harris, “it was after the peace treaties that land occupied by maroons came to be surveyed and mapped” (Agorsah 37). Both the treaties and the Land Allotment Act of 1748 made the colonial authorities demarcate and allot land to the maroons that was, for all intents and purposes, already occupied by the maroons. This mapping of the land had dramatic bearings, for obvious reasons, on maroon livelihood, militia and community. Despite the new restrictions imposed, maroons continued to resist oppression by colonial authorities and mainstream Jamaica, especially the post-emancipation society. In fact, even after Jamaica gained its independence in 1962, the land remains an important aspect of maroons’ self- definition, freedom and autonomy. In a more general context, the land question concerns livelihoods and was also central to a nexus of other political and symbolic issues concerning traditional authority, security, economic stability, power and new types of citizenship. According to Karen Fog Olwig in Small Islands, Large Questions: Society, Culture and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean, the peasantry was able to “wrest control from the plantocracy” by squatting on, renting and purchasing land (5). In Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica, Abigail Bakan avers that, by 1938, Jamaicans believed that “private land cultivation was the most secure single source of income available” (121) and that, besides being one of the effective bargaining tools during the labour riots, land, or landownership, was very instrumental in altering the fundamental balance of power between classes. Furthermore, in Caribbean Land and Development (2007), Jean Besson indicates that, in the post-emancipation Caribbean, land was the primary basis of social identity and belonging; it was the basis for the creation of family lines and the maximization of kinship ties; land symbolized freedom and provided property rights, prestige and personhood; and importantly, family land was an inalienable right (19). Access to land (primarily in the post-emancipation English- speaking Caribbean), therefore, became one of the major indicators of class, status, power and even citizenship. The recuperative role of landscapism, in this regard, serves anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic purposes. Landscapism counters the transformative impact of empire that subjected land to exploitation, abuse and, in other instances, exoticization. The land is relocated from the margins, where 64 it was relegated in colonial discourse along with women, to the centre of postcolonial epistemologies. Glissant argues in Caribbean Discourse that the “relationship with the land ... becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character” (105). Through her representation of the contrast between nationalism and landscapism, May engages this discourse by reclaiming the land from exploitation by both colonial and hegemonic forces (as represented by Flynn and male nationalists). She also alludes to the significance of land to Caribbean cultural and economic survival and self-definition, as evident in the formation of maroon communities, and she places the land at the centre of any discussion of identification and belongingness. May’s advocacy of an ideology of landscapism within the socio-cultural and historical context in Jamaica has considerable symbolic significance for someone who has been hitherto dispossessed and disinherited. In her letter to Nigel, May intimates, “I thought I didn’t have the right to love the place as much as I did because I was not a typical Jamaican, whatever that is. In the yards and streets I felt like my whiteness made me suspect. I even suspected myself of the sin of not belonging” (306). “Loving the land” and creating a space of belonging is mutually constitutive, especially according to NourbeSe Philip, who argues that “bonding” with the land is in itself a form of resistance and an acceptance of one’s rootedness (66). Like the maroons, loving the land places May in a position to abrogate her dispossession by both the nation and Flynn, who relegate her to the status of a bastard. Loving the land assigns her a place in the home/land, and it inserts her in a Jamaican family line; she can reclaim her birthright, “kinship right” and her inalienable right to personhood, security and belongingness in Jamaica. May’s love for the land resonates with the position her great grandmother, Oni, occupies as a maroon—someone, who in every practical sense, is able to create her own “escape.” Consistent with the images of maroons, Oni lives on the outskirts of the country in the Blue Mountain range in what one can term a comparable position of outsideness. As a maroon, she is not a part of the hegemonic configuration of nation; instead, she derives her livelihood from nature and the land with which she shares mutual sustainability. By clearing a portion of Jamaican land she can call her own, Oni gives a voice to her “silent” land/space, which NourbeSe Philip indicates is the ultimate form of resistance; “holding on to [her] silence [her body] is more than a state of non-submission. It is resisting” (99). It is from Oni that May learns an appreciation for the land and its connection to her subjectivity and belongingness. The representation of Oni as a maroon, and May’s forerunner, is germane to the theorization of bastardness/outsideness and marronage as means of creating territories of escape and belongingness. Oni’s background as a maroon is particularly important to May’s quest to create an alternative (outside space) to the hegemonic vision of nation, since as what Vic Reid refers to as a “Griot” and “Rememberencer,” Oni is one of the women “whose gift and duty it is to tell us of our past and point us towards our future” (Reid 1). As a Griot/Rememberencer, Oni assumes cultural agency to produce and explain knowledge to May (who will deploy this knowledge to inform her ideology of landscapism) and to explain her version of (her)story. Ida’s and May’s visits to Oni in the Blue Mountain Range are punctuated by Oni’s riddle: “Are you a girl or a mongoose?” (74). Interestingly, she deploys the mongoose—an animal that has maroon-like qualities—as the organizing signifier in her neo-mythology, her project to create her own form of myths. It is necessary to note here that the mongoose is not 65 native to Jamaica. It was imported from India to kill the snakes that were threatening the livelihood of Jamaicans. However, even though the mongoose is not local to Jamaica, or to the Caribbean in general, it was able to eliminate adversaries and adversities in carving out its own territory or home. Drawing on the physiology and behaviour of the mongoose, Oni conceptualizes a quintessential image of rebellion to instruct May in her own forms of subversion and resistance. In a dream to Ida, May’s mother, Oni represents her version of the etiological narrative: An obeah-man found a baby mongoose in the grass. He took the little mongoose home and, since he had no children, he used his obeah to turn the mongoose into a child, a little girl. He loved the girl like a daughter and protected her from everything that could sting, bite, or poison her. When she grew up, he decided to look for the very best husband for her, and that meant the strongest, because he knew he was getting old and would soon die, and he wanted to make sure she was always protected. (86) The dream describes the man approaching a series of suitors, from the Sun, to the Wind, to the Mountain, all of whom refuse the daughter, claiming that they are not the strongest for her. The Mountain, however, directs the man to the mongoose, claiming, “the mongoose is stronger than I am because he can dig a hole in me” (86). The man then approaches the mongoose, who initially refuses the man’s daughter, claiming “she will never be able to fit in this hole with me” (87). So the man has to morph the girl into a mongoose again to make her suited to her environment and her circumstances. Oni’s myth of the marronage characteristics of the mongoose—its outsideness, dubiousness and shapeshifting—is an appropriate lens for a reading of May’s character, one that elucidates the ways May’s outsideness enables her agency and a propulsion of self beyond the existing limitations of the hegemonic vision of nation. In ways that parallel those of the mongoose, May is situated metaphorically on the outside, but has to insinuate herself inside to effect changes. The mountain, which is central to maroon survival, is metonymic of the land and its importance to May’s ideology of landscapism. Digging a hole in the mountain equates to May’s search for belongingness in Jamaica. Endearing but pointed, therefore, the question “are you girl or mongoose?” serves as a means for May to scrutinize her proclivities and character. Oni’s caveat, if you are mongoose “you ha fe come back a-mountain with me” (74) does not ask May to literally move to the mountains, but rather for her, like the maroons, to create her own home space. Importantly, not loving the nation suggests that May moves outside dominant, “male-stream” forces and oppression, as Carol Boyce Davies suggests a “migratory subject” does. Davies suggests further that the black woman’s “elsewhere” can be a space of creative possibilities: “as ‘elsewhere denotes movement,’ Black female subjectivity asserts agency as it crosses the borders, journeys, migrates and so re-claims as it re-asserts” (37). In explaining her “genealogy of resistance,” which May metaphorically joins, NourbeSe Philip poetically avers that “to love! The is / land is to resist. To love! Is to resist. To love! To resist. Creating genealogies of resistance” (29). Carolyn Cooper also argues in “Resistance Science,” that “a naturalized consequence of the European appropriation of land was the assertion of the right to rewrite history” (109). In loving the land, May not only re-claims it, (re)defines its i-mage, as NourbeSe Philip suggests, and gives it a voice, but she also appropriates it from a space of negation to a space of belonging, empowerment and self-referentiality. Ultimately, she re-fashions the hegemonic representation of nation-state into homeland for all “bastards” (which so many of us are, at least historically)—a home we can claim and a land we can love. 66

Notes 1 As May explains, the English named the island Navy Island (but according to Everard Owen in an article in the Jamaica Observer, the island was named, until 1728, Lynch’s Island after Governor Lynch of Jamaica). The English used the island in the eighteenth century to attack the ships of their Spanish enemy. They then took over the island completely from buccaneers and used it to repair their ships, hence the name Navy Island (Owen 53). The island was largely uninhabited at the end of the colonial period, until Errol Flynn purchased it for his private use and Hollywood parties. In his article in the Jamaica Observer, Owen indicates that the mayor of Port Antonio was petitioning to restore the now closed and abandoned historic island in order to boost tourism in the area.

2 To label so-called “bastards” as existing outside a national identity would result in a multitude of Caribbean peoples being excluded from the body politics of Caribbean countries.

3 Critics such as Evelyn O’Callaghan, Alison Donnell, and Leah Rosenberg have also committed their efforts to an examination of Jamaican women’s literary contributions during the nationalist period. Donnell pays particular attention to the nationalist writings of Una Marson and Amy Bailey. Leah Rosenberg does archival work on the newspaper culture during the nationalist period and shows that between 1898 and 1903, women were contributing tremendously to the literature, as evident by those who won the Jamaica Times short-story contests, such as Annie E. Cork, Florrie Somerset, Winifred Winn-Smith, and so on. Rosenberg ends by echoing Evelyn O’Callaghan and suggesting that “we must read with an eye to historical context and in particular to the newspaper culture in which they published. It is only in this context that the winners of the Jamaica Times short story contest—unknown middle-class women from across Jamaica—can be understood as contributors to the formation of Jamaican nationalism and national literature…” (Nationalism 7).

4 In this regard, “bastardy” also references Carol Boyce Davies’s theorization of “migratory subjectivity,” in Black Women, Writing, And Identity (1994), as having “multiple identities that do not always make for harmony,” conceived in terms of “slipperiness” and “elsewhereness” (36).

5 As McNulty explains, Flynn was fortuitously cast in the role of Captain Blood after the lead actor Robert Donat dropped out (31).

6 McNulty claims that even though Flynn was exonerated of all charges, his popularity declined and he was transformed into an unsavory figure (143, 162).

7 McNulty explains that “Errol Flynn’s lineage to the heroes of the Bounty saga is further enhanced by his namesake uncle Leslie Young’s marriage to Ethel Christian, a descendant of Fletcher Christian” (5). 67

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The Haves and Have-Nots: Class, Globalization and Human Rights in Diana McCaulay’s Dog-Heart Robin Brooks

Source: amazon.com, Book cover for Dog-Heart by Diana McCaulay.

Human rights, whose application is a transnational process, offer guidelines for consciousness raising and social praxis within global civil society. —Faye Harrison, Resisting Racism and Xenophobia 12

Diana McCaulay, a native and lifelong resident of Jamaica, does not shy away from the many controversial issues affecting Jamaican society within the pages of her narratives. Her debut novel, Dog-Heart (2010), is a prime example, as it tackles class prejudices and the gap between different classes, specifically Kingston’s “uptown” (middle-class) and 71

“downtown” (working-class) inhabitants, or those who make up the so-called “Two .” The award-winning Dog-Heart is set in present-day Kingston, Jamaica, and chronicles the association between two protagonists: a middle-class woman, Sahara, and a working-class, inner-city youth, Dexter. The association between Sahara and Dexter creates what is best described as a cross-class relationship, which contributes to the novel’s use of this trope. A recurring literary theme in a number of contemporary novels of the African diaspora, the cross-class relationship pairs two characters from different class backgrounds, typically working-class and middle-class characters. While McCaulay explicitly explores class prejudices in Dog-Heart, she also alludes to the effects of globalization on the lives of her Caribbean characters, and the human rights violations that some of them endure. Through the portrayals of Sahara and Dexter, whose association represents the larger relationship between middle-class and inner-city residents in Jamaica, McCaulay’s novel acts as a cultural lens through which to view the intersections of class relations, globalization and human rights. More specifically, this article argues that the use of the cross-class relationship trope in Dog-Heart operates to identify and foreground human rights violations as a demonstration of the limited efficacy of human rights treaties in contemporary Jamaican society. McCaulay’s inclusion of the term ‘globalization’ early in the novel alerts readers to its significance and its impact on the lives of her characters. When Sahara details her duties as the manager at Summer Lion, a restaurant that her friend owns, she mentions their use of fresh Jamaican produce. She remarks that using only Jamaican produce has “become a challenge—globalization meant it was now easier to buy seedless grapes than mangoes from local vendors” (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 20). This is ironic to her, given that Jamaica is home to several kinds of mangoes. Although cognizant of the way that globalization influences her particular market choices, Sahara fails to see the ways in which globalization and accompanying (or worsening) structural constraints have affected others in the nation, especially those in Dexter’s community. Due to the organization of the novel, however, readers have access to the worlds of both Sahara and Dexter, and are privy to the conditions each faces. Organized around a cross-class narrative structure, Dog-Heart reinforces the juxtaposition between Sahara’s and Dexter’s lives by using the two protagonists as alternating first-person narrators throughout the novel. The novel’s arrangement facilitates comparisons and contrasts between their personal environments, particularly their material realities, family structures and worldviews. Furthermore, McCaulay effects a parallel between the lighter-skinned Sahara and the darker-skinned Arleen (Dexter’s mother), who are both single mothers; so even though Dog-Heart is narrated in the voices of Sahara and Dexter and they present the primary cross-class relationship, Dexter’s family is also implicated in that relationship. By exploring Sahara’s relationship with Dexter and his family members, the novel provides a fuller view of various predicaments facing working-class Jamaicans. According to a number of globalization and human rights scholars such as Faye Harrison, the conditions surrounding many downtown Jamaican households exemplify human rights abuses; I argue here that McCaulay’s novel, depicting examples of these abuses in the scenes that feature Dexter and Arleen, represents advocacy of human rights. Through a layered narrative with multiple plot threads, McCaulay enters a discourse on various types of disparities, as a brief summary elucidates. Dexter’s opening scene in the novel, in which he narrates how he and Sahara initially meet, is what first illuminates their contrasting life experiences. This scene immediately outlines the unequal relationship for readers. Sahara and her teenage son Carl are leaving a movie theatre at Sovereign Plaza in uptown Kingston, a place with mainly middle- and upper-class patrons. In contrast, Dexter is at the Sovereign Plaza, the place where he thinks “plenty rich people go” (14), to beg money of the patrons, which is how he helps to feed his family. Dexter cannot imagine being able to frequent the movie theatre as a pastime, while Sahara not only pays to see a 72 movie but also has enough money left over to give Dexter five hundred Jamaican dollars. Speaking in the Jamaican language, Dexter exclaims, “Me can’t believe it, no way at all. Nobody ever—ever give me five hundred dollar” (17; emphasis in original). Though this amount is roughly equivalent to five US dollars, Dexter’s excited reaction lets readers know how large a sum of money this is in his world. The narrative goes on to chronicle Sahara’s decision to help Dexter’s family and to find sponsors to pay the educational expenses for Dexter and his siblings to attend uptown schools. Still, the overall differences in their worldviews present major obstacles for their relationship, and Sahara’s preconceived notions about Dexter and his family serve as additional barriers. Despite Sahara’s haphazard efforts to help Dexter and his family, the novel closes with Dexter assisting in the kidnapping of Sahara as part of a gang initiation. Ultimately, however, Dexter rebels against his accomplices and allows Sahara to go free. The literary criticism on the novel (which exists overwhelmingly in the form of book reviews) is united in pointing out that the central issue in the novel is class, but the scholarship is limited and does not present substantive analyses of class or its interconnections with other issues. Perhaps one of the most thorough reviewers, Lorna Down suggests that McCaulay’s greatest achievement in the novel “is that she helps us see that there are no easy answers to questions of class structures and class relations, to poverty and violence” (108). However, presumably because of the restricted format of the book review, Down does not detail specifics concerning the difficulties between classes. In her review of Dog-Heart, Lisa Allen-Agostini also points out the serious issues raised by the novel concerning education for inner- city children. While in attendance at the uptown schools, Dexter experiences prejudice from school officials and other students, which hinders his educational success. While my article is in conversation with these discussions of the novel, it distinguishes itself by underscoring Dog-Heart’s position within a larger framework of not only contemporary literature but also globalization and human rights discussions. Over the past few decades, literary artists and an increasing number of scholars from various disciplines have been active participants in the growing debate over the interconnections between globalization and human rights. Defining the terms ‘globalization’ and ‘human rights’ continues to be complex; however, most definitions of these terms overlap. Alison Brysk defines human rights as “a set of claims and entitlements to human dignity, which the existing international regime assumes will be provided (or threatened) by the state” (1). Elaborating on this definition, Faye Harrison explains human rights as “the morally and legally justifiable claims to dignity, liberty, personal security and basic well- being that all persons can make by virtue of being human” (“Introduction” 11). The contemporary phase of globalization—or what Brysk defines as “the growing interpenetration of states, markets, communications, and ideas across borders” (1)—has generated a substantial amount of scholarship concerning the benefits and costs associated with its transnational interactions. One great concern is that the conditions of globalization have led to an increase in human rights violations throughout the world. Both Brysk and Harrison argue that the correlation between the two is not a simple matter, as various factors ranging from the dynamic processes of globalization to the policies of international institutions and corporations play a role. These issues and other socioeconomic and political questions raised in Dog-Heart are also part of a larger literary conversation; along with novels like Garfield Ellis’s For Nothing at All, Olive Senior’s Dancing Lessons, Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, Dog-Heart belongs to a rich tradition of contemporary fiction interrogating such issues in the context of neoliberal iterations of globalization in postcolonial Caribbean societies. Focusing specifically on Jamaica, Harrison contends that there is reason for serious concern about the human rights of citizens: “Jamaica has a human rights crisis, according to reports from international human rights organizations (e.g., Amnesty International, 73

Human Rights Watch)” (“Everyday Neoliberalism” 7). Deteriorating human rights influence class, and some scholars posit that globalization has contributed to the present-day growth in class inequalities (Scholte 323). Thus, there is a strong scholarly consensus about the relationship between class relations, globalization and human rights. Moreover, this article builds on Harrison’s scholarship, which asserts interconnections between fiction and other disciplines. In a study on Alice Walker’s novelThe Temple of My Familiar, Harrison emphasizes parallels between Walker’s work and other disciplines: “[t]he interrelationship between the use of historical and anthropological literatures as sources for facts and ideas, and the writing of culture in fictive rhetoric, is salient in Walker’s work, which strongly resonates with discourses in a number of scholarly disciplines” (Outsider 124). She further declares that ethnic/minority fiction “represents a rich mode of writing the cultures, cultural politics, and history of our multicultural world structured in relations of dominance” (119–20; emphasis in original), and that ethnographic writers should recognize its value for their work. I contend that Dog-Heart also fits Harrison’s argument, in that McCaulay draws on various subject areas and addresses many real-life issues throughout her narrative. Let me qualify my contention by stating that I am not suggesting McCaulay’s novel is a case study of the problems of classism, globalization and human rights abuses in contemporary Jamaica, as it is not. Such issues are also not new to Jamaica, as many scholars of the Caribbean, including Stephen Vasciannie, Tracy Robinson, Verene Shepherd and Rhon Reynolds, have written on these topics. Still, Dog-Heart participates in these discourses by sketching them in fictive form, thus offering another perspective and potentially raising these issues with audiences who may not be privy to this information when presented in modes such as case studies in history or the social sciences. The novel presents an alternative to such studies and is a “representation of truth-telling” (McClennen and Moore 14). McCaulay’s novel aligns with Evelyn O’Callaghan’s description of the ways that “imaginative writing challenges, reframes and fills in the gaps in narrative accounts of these statistical and ‘fact’ based disciplines” (1). My own contention is that literary artists creatively perform what scholars in fields such as sociology, anthropology and economics research in their publications—an analysis of the state of affairs in given societies. Similarly reinforcing the primacy of fiction, Harrison writes, “Fiction encodes truth claims—and alternative modes of theorizing—in a rhetoric of imagination that accommodates and entertains the imaginable” (Outsider 121; emphasis in original). Fiction, in short, has the potential to add to social-science discourses by revealing another way of theorizing real life. An interdisciplinary approach to McCaulay’s Dog-Heart also serves to further the emancipatory project of exposing human rights violations in order to rectify them. If we want a comprehensive understanding of how societies are addressing human rights failings, the discussion must include the influences of a wider range of fields—including literary studies. Since the 1970s, literature has been central to human rights advocacy, being frequently featured in campaigns across the globe (McClennen and Moore 10). Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore assert that “[t] he use of literature as a vehicle for human rights advocacy is at once a way to illuminate the humanity of the speaking subject as it is a mode of reflecting a true ‘story’ that has been erased [or ignored and undervalued] by official ‘history’” (12). A reading that places McCaulay’s fictional representation of Jamaica in the context of human rights discourse helps exemplify how novels can be a crucial site of inquiry in human rights studies and demonstrates that fiction can be just as critical in the fight for human rights justice as documents and studies within the social sciences. Rather than a broad and abstract plot, McCaulay’s novel offers a realistic and comprehensible storyline that can be used in confronting the intricate nature of human rights injustices. Thinking of literature as making a critical intervention into contemporary injustices and imbalances can work well, both to advance thinking 74 around socioeconomic abuses and to strengthen the analysis of literary texts. Literature adds emotional depth and complexity to statistics, policy documents and reports. Dog-Heart demonstrates what is at stake for segments of Jamaican society in the continued absence or neglect of human rights justice; the book brings attention to inequities in an attempt to destabilize an unjust status quo, and this is a step toward facilitating positive change. McCaulay’s Dog-Heart participates in a discussion of human rights as they are outlined specifically in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). These rights have been jeopardized greatly under globalization. Specifically, the book engages conversations that question the effectiveness of human rights treaties at the domestic (national) level. A part of the International Bill of Human Rights, the ICESCR highlights rights related to having “an adequate standard of living,” including access to essentials such as food, housing and employment (Articles 6.1, 11.1). The novel’s allusion to this covenant is particularly important because global discussions of human rights tend to pay less attention to the rights outlined in the document; instead, a great deal of conversation tends to focus on civil and political rights (Harrison, “Global Apartheid” 53). The novel does not allow the rights expressed in the ICESCR to be overshadowed, and it sheds light on the continued violations of these particular rights today. McCaulay also depicts the more internationally recognized violations of civil and political rights in Jamaica, such as incidents of Jamaican police killing innocent civilians. Like many others, she emphasizes that, in this current period of globalization, Caribbean nations face crises ranging from severe unemployment to inadequate education to violence. Ultimately, tracing these instances and showing how characters’ situations fit under the ICESCR standards highlights interconnections between fiction and literary studies (and the humanities more broadly) and the social sciences. While the ICESCR standards are not beyond challenge and some standards may differ slightly depending upon geographical location, they offer a valuable lens through which to view McCaulay’s narrative. Given that Jamaica ratified the ICESCR in 1975 and all the rights within it are still, to a large extent, not protected, Dog-Heart also facilitates a critique of a key human rights monitoring mechanism, which is state reporting. Approximately every four to five years, nations who have ratified human rights treaties must submit a report on their implementation of the treaties to a committee of experts (a treaty body). The committee offers recommendations for improvement known as Concluding Observations (COs) in response to the report. While this monitoring system has been in use for decades, the continued failure of some nations to protect human rights raises a question about its relevance and effectiveness. Jasper Krommendijk notes that, despite the process of state reporting being “one of the most important international mechanisms to monitor the implementation of UN human rights,” there are only a few studies that examine its effectiveness (490). Like a number of scholars, including Deborah Thomas, who notes the class segregation of Kingston’s residential districts in her work on violence (103), McCaulay underscores the stark contrasts between the uptown and downtown areas of Kingston and their different standards of living. She aligns her characters within contemporary, real-life class structures, and the juxtaposition between Dexter’s and Sahara’s private lives points out the vast differences between them. Through the descriptions of key elements, such as their family structure and relations, homes and daily activities, including their means of securing money, readers are able to discern the gravity of the discrepancy between their lifestyles. Quite succinctly, the descriptions and information about their living situations present a bleak predicament for Dexter and his family; in fact, they suffer human rights abuses while Sahara and those 75 in her sphere tend to fare much better. The novel invites a key inquiry about who will ensure that all Jamaicans’ human rights are protected.

The Right to Adequate Housing and Food While human rights treaties should protect every citizen in the nation once ratified, McCaulay’s novel shows that people are affected in different ways even within the same nation, resulting in a situation where the aim of human rights work to guarantee adequate housing and food remains “unrealized in practice” (Goldberg 61). The novel’s middle-class protagonist, Sahara, represents, for lack of a better phrase, the control group in McCaulay’s narrative exploration of human rights effectiveness, while working-class Dexter represents the experimental group that is radically affected by the failure to ensure that human rights are upheld. The novel shows how the middle class experiences a level of security against the “escalated cost of living” during the current phase of globalization (Thomas 10). McCaulay uses the actual Kingston neighbourhood of Mona as Sahara’s locale, stating in an interview that “Mona is, by definition, a middle-class address. Middle-class, professional” (“Uptown and Downtown” 96). Moreover, McCaulay draws our attention to the issue of colour and class: Sahara is of mixed heritage, her father an “English missionary” (Dog-Heart 26) and her mother an Afro- Jamaican schoolteacher. Sahara’s lighter hue and her parents’ positions in the society afford her benefits that many others are not granted. Besides being white, her father is also a pastor, a position of authority in her childhood community. Although he eventually abandons his family after having an affair with one of the members of his congregation, Sahara continues to have a level of privilege, as her mother raises her with the aid of household helpers in the Mona neighbourhood. Sahara inherits the Mona house after her mother’s death. By portraying Sahara as a person of middle-class rather than upper-class status, the novel reinforces the idea that human rights disparities in Jamaica are not simply a matter of extremes, susceptible to an easy fix. Rather, McCaulay’s more nuanced representation suggests that a more detailed and complex monitoring mechanism is needed, because rights violations are not clear-cut. Sahara’s descriptions of her belongings disclose that she is not at the top of the social hierarchy. The description of her house, which she labels “modest” (29), and the changing circumstances in the community illuminate her somewhat vulnerable position within middle-class Jamaica. Sahara narrates: The house itself was unremarkable, three small bedrooms, a living/dining room, small porch, two bathrooms and a kitchen. Terrazzo tile floors ... I painted every room a different colour, tore down the dingy drapes and lace curtains, bought and refurbished flea- market furniture, hung my collection of carved calabashes, tried to give the boring rooms personality. (37) The house is not lavish, but she is happy with it, and her right to housing appears not to be violated. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), whose job it is to make sure nations are adhering to the covenant, notes in its General Comment 4 that “the right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head…. Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity” (“Right to Adequate Housing” para. 7). According to this description, however, Sahara may or may not have adequate housing. She expresses displeasure about items being stolen on a regular basis from the houses in her community, and she claims to be 76 grateful that her car is older because it can serve as a deterrent to potential thieves. Eric Posner, in The Twilight of Human Rights Law, discusses how ambiguous language in some human rights treaties is a hindrance to their implementation. McCaulay’s novel places Sahara in an ambiguous position within the middle class, highlighting the problematic nature of some of the ICESCR terminology, as well as its application. Earlier in the narrative, when Sahara drives away in her old Volkswagen from the Sovereign Plaza where she meets Dexter, he comments that most uptown people drive SUVs. Her ordinary car sheds additional light on her place within middle-class Jamaica. Nevertheless, although Sahara is not at the top of the hierarchy, she admits that she and Carl enjoy a level of security and privilege that many others in Jamaica do not. While Sahara’s circumstances may complicate ideas of the effectiveness of human rights treaties, the living experiences of her counterpart Dexter and his family on the other side of town in the Jacob’s Pen community establish that the existence of human rights treaties alone cannot correct injustice. In the scenes displaying Dexter’s housing and access to food, McCaulay’s narrative severely interrogates, as a number of scholars do, the relevance of the rights outlined in the ICESCR, given the reality that they are not being upheld for everyone. Even when nations complete the periodic report and conceal or admit their failure to secure specific rights, the report results in yet another document (the CO) but does not translate into fulfilled rights. Dexter and his family members appear to be in a near-helpless situation and unable to improve their circumstances truly. They are struggling just to survive, and their chances of having a better standard of living or achieving upward mobility seem dismal. Harrison asserts that “[w]hile the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights may lend legitimacy to those rights ... in reality socioeconomic rights are being repudiated within the ‘New World Order’” (“Expanding the Concept” 6). In other words, although the rights are outlined, they are often not being protected. The descriptions of Dexter’s community display, in fictive form, examples of human rights abuses that even the most recent CO document notes are still happening in Jamaica. Drafted in 2013, the CO from the UNCESCR mentions the continued “acute housing situation” (“Concluding Observations” 8). To improve the conditions, the Committee recommends that Jamaica “adopt a comprehensive national housing strategy with a view to ensuring access to adequate and affordable housing with legal security of tenure for everyone … [and that the strategy be] developed based on a systematic needs assessment and consultation with and participation by affected individuals” (8). One problem with such a course of action, however, is that the perspectives of those in communities like Dexter’s tend to be ignored. As a way not to offend any inner-city communities in Kingston, McCaulay creates a fictitious name, Jacob’s Pen, for Dexter’s neighbourhood. That name in itself is a point of analysis. A pen represents a holding place, usually for animals, and it references a spatial structure dating from slavery, where a pen was used on a type of estate (usually for coffee). Whether or not this is the author’s intention, this name symbolizes the harsh conditions in Dexter’s community and the devaluing of its residents. Dog-Heart mimics the type of language present in COs, highlighting the redundancy of certain terms in descriptions of Jamaican housing and contesting the effectiveness of the repeated COs that continually use such phrases. Within the 2013 CO document, the Committee mentions “overcrowded, unsafe and dilapidated housing” (UNCESC, “Concluding Observations” 8). McCaulay’s narrative echoes such terms and is unsparing in its upsetting descriptions of Dexter’s surroundings. Not only do the descriptions of Dexter’s neighbourhood paint a picture of a below-average standard of living, but they also depict an environment that looks like a war zone, which obviously does not meet the standards 77 of adequate housing outlined in the covenant: “The place looked bombed—buildings were windowless and defaced with political graffiti. The rich ones in Jacob’s Pen lived in unrendered concrete houses, half constructed, with steel emerging from flat roofs—a second floor planned, even though the ground floor was unfinished” (46). A roof over one’s head is not sufficient to merit the term ‘housing’; yet Dexter and his family seem to have only a little more than that. Developing the visual imagery, McCaulay invokes Habitat for Humanity, a global non- governmental organization originating in the United States that has worldwide networks to build low- cost housing for less-fortunate people. Dexter’s family lives in a one-room Habitat for Humanity house built by foreigners, and the inside is bare and lacks basic amenities. The role of Habitat for Humanity in addressing human rights concerns in Jamaica is an interesting point to interrogate. Frankly, this organization is not the answer to solving Jamaica’s inadequate housing. This is not its job and the Jamaican government cannot outsource its responsibility to its citizens to Habitat for Humanity, especially because this non-profit is limited in its ability to provide adequate housing for the many Jamaican residents needing it. In Habitat for Humanity’s 2017 annual report, it reported that, for the entire region of Latin America and the Caribbean, it completed 44,365 new and rehab construction projects (Global Impact). Jamaica’s population alone encompasses nearly three million people. Habitat for Humanity simply does not have the resources to meet the needs of those in the population needing better housing. Another significant issue concerning Habitat for Humanity’s feasibility for being a major part of the answer for meeting housing rights is its selection criteria. Those selected must demonstrate the “ability to repay a mortgage through an affordable payment plan” (Habitat for Humanity, “Frequently”). What if a person is chronically unemployed and unable to pay a mortgage? Furthermore, the UNCESCR General Comment 4 clarifies that “the right to adequate housing” includes “adequate privacy, adequate space, adequate security, adequate lighting and ventilation, adequate basic infrastructure and adequate location with regard to work and basic facilities—all at a reasonable cost” (para. 7). Habitat for Humanity’s website informs readers about the modest sizes of its houses, “Habitat houses are modestly sized. They are large enough for the homeowner family’s needs, but small enough to keep construction and maintenance costs affordable.” What happens if the family grows? Among its other inadequacies, Dexter’s family’s home does not fully accommodate the family’s size, and Dexter’s narration reveals how the house contrasts with the UNCESCR’s normative description of ‘housing’: This is what is in our house. Front room—one three-quarter bed. One cot. One cardboard barrel where clothes keep. One little gas stove with big gas cylinder. One nice dresser Mumma say she find on the side of the road before I born and her uncle fix up. TV on top of that. TV is very small and show only black and white picture. I shame of that and never tell anybody at Nightingale All Age is only black and white TV we has. Small igloo in another corner.... Calendar from last year and picture a Jesus on wall. One lamp on dresser near TV. That is where we steal the light. Marlon father—him a ’lectrician—he take light from public service pole on that side a the house. (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 59) Here McCaulay plays on the common illegal practice of stealing electricity that the Jamaica Public Service Company, which is the only electricity distributor in Jamaica, has reported as increasing in recent times. The father of Dexter’s younger brother, Marlon, represents the many who use this method due to adverse circumstances that render them unable to pay for electricity. Dexter, who is twelve years old at this point in the narrative, describes a house that survives on theft and is filled with barely 78 functional, decrepit items. He recognizes the subpar nature of his home and is ashamed as a result. There are other shame-inducing circumstances in Dexter’s home situation; for instance, they have to defecate and urinate in a bucket out back. Since they do not have running water in their house, Dexter and Marlon also have to go every morning, like so many other children, to a water stop in the neighbourhood to retrieve water. This is no small task, but Dexter is relieved that “at least where [he] live[s] is close to standpipe” (24). Still, the safety and cleanliness of the water is uncertain. McCaulay illustrates here that one of their human rights is compromised, as the “human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses” according to General Comment No. 15 (UNCESCR, “Human Right to Water” para. 2). Again, this human right is on the books, but is it really effective in the lives of those like Dexter and his family? Dexter and his family exert much effort to address their needs, but they still fall short due to circumstances beyond their control. The narrative’s use of the cross-class relationship trope also lays the ground for critiquing another provision outlined in the ICESCR, as Sahara and her family have access to “adequate food” and the enjoyment of being “free from hunger” (United Nations General Assembly Article 11.1, 11.2), while Dexter’s family does not. While the Committee has been collecting reports from nations concerning the right to adequate food since the late 1970s, in 1999 it saw the need to add UNCESCR General Comment No. 12, which expounds on food rights, because “only a few States parties have provided information sufficient and precise enough to enable the Committee to determine the prevailing situation in the countries concerned with respect to this right and to identify the obstacles to its realization” (“Right to Adequate Food” para. 2). It took the Committee a couple of decades to recognize that the monitoring mechanism was not working and to commit to making a change. Simply having ratified these treaties does not erase the lack of agricultural education, the high cost of importing food, the lack of employment or the occurrence of environmental conditions such as hurricanes, droughts and floods—all of which affect food security. In her portrayals of Sahara’s family, McCaulay details scenes of food consumption in a family kitchen setting; such portrayals are absent in scenes featuring Dexter’s family. Sahara and her now teenage son Carl are living alone in the Mona house, where the availability of daily meals is not a concern. Carl experiences a far more comfortable life than Dexter, which is evident in the descriptions of Carl’s material assets, such as his electronics and pricey sneakers, as well as in his complaints that they are having chicken again for dinner instead of steak (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 26). According to Sahara, who chastises him, Carl is seemingly ungrateful for the things in his life. She admits that Carl is taking his circumstances for granted when she thinks about the day she met Dexter: “Carl probably ate more than [Dexter] does in a week” (22). On another day, when Sahara asks Carl if he wants salad, he responds, “No. I want french fries, swimming in oil and smothered in salt. With a steak. But I know what I’m going to get is an omelette and a salad” (124; emphasis in original). Here, Sahara not only makes sure Carl has food but also that he has healthy eating habits. Food insecurity is not a serious concern for this family. In fact, Sahara is secure enough that she is able to bring bags of food to Dexter and his family on a regular basis, which further emphasizes her own family’s access to food. In addition to the lack of electricity and running water in his low-quality housing, Dexter becomes the novel’s poster child for food insecurity, as his family’s struggle to obtain food, or rather, to exercise their right to adequate food, exemplifies a continued history of insufficient human rights implementation. In 2013, the UNCESCR recognized that Jamaica’s difficulties in guaranteeing this particular right were “due to the frequency of natural hazards, inefficient farming practices, lack 79 of suitable land, and increases in commodity prices” (“Concluding Observations” para 26). Yet its suggestion for ways to improve is vague and deficient, recommending that Jamaica “adopt effective long-term strategies aimed at improving domestic productivity in a sustainable manner and building the capacity of local farmers, taking into account the Committee’s General Comment No. 12 (1999) on the right to adequate food” (para 26). In other words, the document says that it recognizes Jamaica is not fulfilling this right, so Jamaica needs to come up with a strategy to fulfill this right. Neither the UNCESCR nor the state of Jamaica seems to have found a solution, however, and McCaulay’s novel reveals the cost: Dexter, the oldest of Arleen’s three children, is largely responsible for providing for the basic needs of his family. In fact, Arleen, who is unemployed, sends him to beg for money every day after school so that they can eat. Without the money that he collects, the family would be left hungry on many nights. Unlike Carl who complains of having chicken instead of steak for dinner, Dexter and his family are grateful for cheap fish and dumplings. They express joy when Sahara begins to bring food, a “big plastic bag with mackerel, corn beef, corn meal, rice, flour, sugar, saltfish, [and] condense milk” (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 53). Their great appreciation for these basic ingredients adds to the novel’s foregrounding of human rights injustices. Concerning food, General Comment 12 from the UNCESCR stipulates that the “right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement” (para. 6). By depicting that this is not the case in this Jacob’s Pen household, McCaulay’s novel challenges the practical relevance of General Comment 12 in people’s everyday lives, as the descriptions reveal that Dexter and his family do not have “the availability of food in a quantity and quality sufficient to satisfy the[ir] dietary needs” (para. 8). Reviewing Jamaica’s compliance and non-compliance with regard to rights every few years, without meaningful suggestions and provisions for their effective execution, will continue to prove a futile endeavour. Overall, the novel’s depiction of this family’s lack of human rights—access to basic needs such as housing, water, and food—furthers claims about the limited interventions treaties make on the national and individual levels. They will continue to be limited if steps beyond written law are not taken.

The Right to Work and Its Dilemmas While the pairing of the two protagonists allows McCaulay to show that Sahara is gainfully employed, it also reinforces “the global silencing and denial about the true costs of global capitalism” by underscoring Sahara’s enjoyment of a sense of security that is absent among Dexter and his family (Goldberg 63). Once Sahara becomes the breadwinner of her family, she finds employment “at a real estate firm doing their books” (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 29). She does not make an exorbitant amount of money there, but it is enough to take care of herself and Carl. The covenant’s provisions call for people to be able to make a “decent living for themselves and their families,” so readers clearly see that Sahara’s “right to work” (United Nations General Assembly, Articles 7(a), 6.1) is being satisfied. McCaulay reveals that Sahara is able to secure employment at the firm without prior experience or any formal education beyond “a good early education” (Dog-Heart 29); arguably, this is a blatant example in the novel where her skin colour plays a role in her circumstances. Esther Figueroa declares that Sahara is able to secure this type of employment, despite being a single mother with no advanced education, because of her light skin colour and her class: 80

One unmentioned gift is Sahara’s light skin; her father was an English missionary. Arleen is a country-girl who came to town to work as a maid, got pregnant and was thrown out, but had no house in Mona to move into; her education was only primary school [as] she can barely read and write, and as a black skinned poor Jamaican even with ‘a head for figures’ there is no way a real-estate firm would have hired her to do their books. (5) Figueroa parallels Arleen and Sahara and notes that the greatest distinguishing factor between them is class and colour. In an interview, McCaulay notes that class and skin colour are still very much connected in contemporary Jamaica: “If you’re middle-class, you’re more likely to be light-skinned. It’s not a perfect correlation, of course, but if you walk around a downtown Kingston community, most people are going to be dark-skinned” (“Uptown and Downtown” 96). Sahara’s light skin colour and middle-class status “positions” her for the job at the firm. In Downtown Ladies, Gina A. Ulysse outlines a four-tier class structure in Jamaica: the lower class, middle class, upper class, and elites. While explaining that this outline is not definitive, she notes that the majority black population is largely a part of the lower class, while the middle class consists of a brown population (Ulysse 13). For Sahara, skin colour “operates as a form of capital” (Ulysse 19). Sahara also receives additional benefits that Dexter and his family do not because of her associations with other middle-class people. After the real estate job, Sahara becomes the manager of her friend’s restaurant in Liguanea, an uptown Kingston area. Sahara did not have funds to attend a university, but her childhood friend Lydia went abroad to attend the University of Florida; she later decided to drop out of school to pursue her dreams of being a chef. When Lydia returns to Kingston to turn a building on family land into a restaurant, she recruits Sahara to manage it. Such connections are vital, especially in a time when jobs are scarce. Not only does the job provide Sahara with stability, but it is also a source of enjoyment for her, which is not what Dexter and people in his area experience concerning employment. By way of contrast with Sahara’s job opportunities, McCaulay’s novel demonstrates that the existence of the ICESCR is not alleviating the reality that employment in this period of globalization is increasingly difficult to find for a large percentage of Jamaican citizens, as represented by Arleen (Harrison, Outsider, 185–86). Among Sahara’s greatest frustrations with Arleen is her lack of formal employment; completely exasperated, Sahara questions in her interior monologue, “Why couldn’t she get a proper job?” (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 186). Her inability to comprehend Arleen’s situation leads Sahara to contemplate trying to take Dexter and his siblings from their mother’s care: “I was impatient with her ineptness, her unsuitability as a parent. Often I thought about getting the children away from her” (186). Sahara is irritated by and does not understand Arleen’s actions, especially why she is not providing more for Dexter and his siblings. Her interior monologues, full of misunderstandings, cause readers to assess Sahara’s complaints, scrutinize Arleen more closely, and consider what other factors could be contributing to the current state of Arleen’s and her family’s lives. Despite Sahara’s frustrations, readers can see that Arleen is doing the best she can. In a compassionate description of his mother, Dexter recounts the type of work she does to help him and his siblings: “Sometime I feel sorry for Mumma, like today. I know she do her best to look after the three a we. Mumma sew ’til her finger cramp and her eye run water” (63). Although much of her work is confined to the domestic realm, Arleen appears to gain some money from her sewing. Eudine Barriteau discusses the history of working-class Jamaican women doing seamstress and domestic work (196); often, these are poorly paid jobs, and the women can barely provide for their children. Figueroa expounds on Arleen’s troubling state of affairs, claiming that “She sews, she tries to make ends meet but she is defeated by her sense of 81 helplessness and dependency, and has put the great burden of feeding the family on her twelve year old son Dexter” (5). As a result, Dexter has responsibilities incommensurate with his age. Sahara appears oblivious to the structural constraints that contribute to Dexter’s and his family’s situation, and how such hardships are characteristic of an increasingly globalized Jamaica that finds itself unable to guarantee every right within the ICESCR. For many in Jacob’s Pen, a real problem is a lack of available jobs, and the people have no other options due to little or no structural support. This is perhaps the greatest misunderstanding in the cross-class relationship: Sahara does not comprehend that the gravity of the circumstances in Dexter’s community is not simply a matter of behavioural impediments. There is a long-standing scholarly debate regarding whether social inequalities are due to individuals’ behaviours or social structures; Cornel West, in his well-known Race Matters, argues that a balance in this debate is necessary because the two cannot be separated. He explains that “how people act and live are shaped—though in no way dictated or determined—by the larger circumstances in which they find themselves” (West 12). Presenting this reality in a literary format, McCaulay displays the complexities of her characters and their situations, highlighting the need for more ways to measure the effectiveness of human rights treaties. Sahara believes that getting an education will resolve all of Dexter’s problems, but, actually, “the whole question of education is an example of the class divide in that, for the middle-class person, for Sahara, education is the answer” (McCaulay, “Uptown and Downtown” 97). The educational system itself is closely tied to class and it, in some ways, perpetuates class divisions, in that those who live in communities with more money attend schools that are better equipped to help students succeed. Sahara fails to see the intricacies in Dexter’s family situation and acts as if behavioural factors alone contribute to their predicament. Ironically, readers learn the complexity of Dexter’s life and community through Sahara’s failure to see the complexity, thus disqualifying her from being the unquestionable moral voice of the novel. Although she, too, is a single female who is heading her household, Sahara finds it difficult to sympathize with Arleen who, like many other Jamaican women, is being undercut in the job market under the conditions of contemporary globalization. A recent CO notes that “despite the higher educational attainment of women, their unemployment rate remains more than twice that of men” (UNCESCR, “Concluding Observations” para 13); yet the topic of gender inequality in Jamaica pervades Caribbean feminist scholarship, so this news is not new. It has been a part of the society for generations and the ratification of ICESCR has not moved the dial to complete equality, although many women have progressed substantially through the years. Sahara and Arleen share the fact that their colour influences their gender vulnerability (Sahara as brown and Arleen as black), and, as single mothers, they also share the gendered position and experience of being vulnerable to men’s exploitation. Mirroring a trope that occurs elsewhere in Caribbean women’s writing, Carl’s father’s family, a white family from old money, rejects Sahara because of her colour and class, and she is thus abandoned with her son: “In no time I was pregnant and Lester’s horrified family had shipped him off to England” (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 28). She has no choice but to raise Carl alone. Arleen, black and impoverished, is even more vulnerable to men’s sexual exploitation and abandonment. None of her three children’s fathers are assisting her. Building on the work of A. Lynn Bolles, Harrison explains that “[t]hose bearing the heaviest burden in coping with the social and economic austerity are women, a large proportion of whom have the responsibility—whether they are formally employed or not—to support households and family networks” (Outsider 186). Put differently, women bear the brunt of the struggles, and McCaulay encapsulates these experiences via Arleen’s and Sahara’s characters. However, although they are both single mothers, the various 82 intersections in Arleen’s and Sahara’s lives cause them to experience different life trajectories and, perhaps because their situations are so different, Sahara does not recognize the similarities between them. Sahara fails to see Arleen truly, and her observations indicate that she believes Arleen simply needs to change her actions, which is a very limited perception that does not consider the larger factors at work. Maria Thorin, in her research on gender and globalization, illuminates these larger factors when she asserts that “after the positive impacts have been balanced against the negative impacts in the various dimensions of the globalization process, women’s material well-being is generally found to have deteriorated and gender inequality to have increased as a consequence of globalization, thereby intensifying the marginalization of women and the ‘feminization of poverty’” (13). Thorin describes a troubling and unhealthy cycle that is becoming all too familiar in contemporary Jamaican society, and McCaulay captures it in Dog-Heart. Yet Sahara simply does not think Arleen is a good mother, since Sahara cannot imagine being in such dire straits. No one in her world has circumstances like those who live in Jacob’s Pen. The role of the government in helping citizens is at the forefront of answers to the questions of why there is a lack of available jobs and why human rights treaties are limited in their effectiveness. Governments are supposed to ensure the productivity of their nations and their citizens. In a scene narrated by Dexter, McCaulay alludes to Jamaica’s former Prime Minister Michael Manley and his Land Lease Program: That same Prime Minister everybody love, Michael Manley, him give land to poor people for growin food. Old people say everybody love that. But instead a farmin, the people sell off every bit a the land and Jacob’s Pen don’t have not even one piece a dirt leave that could grow a patch a callaloo. People not supposed to sell the land and now the government say everybody who live in the land leases part a Jacob’s Pen is a squatter. (Dog-Heart 96) A major purpose of the program was to increase employment for small farmers by providing them with land and resources. It was not enough to bring and keep many people out of poverty, regrettably. Although the Jamaican government, as represented here, is not perfect (as no government is), many scholars reveal that the Jamaican government, like many other Caribbean governments, is quite limited in what it can do to assist its citizens because of the regulations of international monetary institutions to which it is beholden. For example, Harrison asserts that “Postcolonial Jamaica, like many other Third World and Southern Hemisphere countries, is beset by a serious case of debt bondage” (Outsider 185). In other words, Jamaica’s hands are tied. In his book, Twilight, which emphasizes there is little evidence that human rights treaties have improved people’s well-being (Posner 7), Posner discusses how some nations simply are “not wealthy enough or well organized enough to comply with the treaty obligations” (32). In searching for answers concerning the Jamaican government’s quandary, many scholars point to neoliberal policies, which encourage deregulation, privatization and unrestricted marketization. Jan Aart Scholte maintains, in his study on globalization, that many of the international institutions (e.g., the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization), which are supposedly helping countries such as Jamaica, promote neoliberal policies and have been doing so since the 1980s (324). Scholte is unconvinced of the overall effectiveness of these policies and discusses the disadvantages: “Fiscal austerity to improve ‘global competitiveness’ has often meant reductions in the amount and quality of state-provided education, housing, nutrition, health care, pensions and unemployment insurance. In sum, neoliberalist globalization has tended to erode the protective shield of the redistributive state” (324). In other words, provisions are diminishing and there is no safety net 83 for citizens who experience hard times. The Jamaican government, like governments of similar debt- ridden nations, has been unable to create sustainable alternatives to the policies suggested and imposed by the international institutions (Harrison, “Introduction” 14). Harrison further explicates that these policies are responsible for the slashing of social provisioning and for eliminating the public sector jobs that poor people once had access to through political patronage. The denationalization and privatization thrust so central to current policies of economic restructuring eliminated that category of work, leaving many even more dependent on the informal and often the illegal economy. (“Everyday Neoliberalism” 7) Harrison shows how these policies affect employment, housing and food provisions, and her explanation clarifies why Dexter and his family engage in illegal or underground activities. Having little to no other options because of the limited ability of the Jamaican government to assist, Dexter, like many others in his community, turns to illegal undertakings and participation in an underground economy. Quite simply, the residents of Jacob’s Pen are trying to secure money to eat and to live. Later in the novel, Dexter contemplates the type of employment he may be able to secure when he becomes older; his list of legal options is limited and includes being a grocery packer, car washer and security guard (119). Since the novel sets up Carl as a foil for Dexter, readers surmise that Carl’s journey in life ultimately will end better than Dexter’s, just as Sahara’s life path is set to be more fulfilling than Arleen’s. The ultimate significance of this structural comparison between Dexter and Carl is to reiterate the key point of the limited efficacy of human rights treaties. Dexter’s begging or panhandling is an informal way to get money, and many use begging as a means to try and meet their needs. Many do not qualify for the jobs that may be available because the jobs require some level of skill or education that they lack. The schools in their communities do not prepare them as well as schools in the uptown communities or enable them to thrive and possibly experience upward mobility, which is another way McCaulay represents human rights injustices concerning the right to education, outlined in the ICESCR (United Nations General Assembly Article 13). They also do not have adequate transportation to school because of a lack of buses, so some children have to alternate who will go to school. Although he does gain access to an uptown school, Dexter comes to believe that an education will not help him and that he needs to seek other means to improve his circumstances. At the same time, Dexter fears he is getting too old to beg, recognizing that people are less sympathetic the older he becomes. This reality—coupled with the constant humiliation from school officials and other students in the uptown school in which Sahara enrolls him—causes Dexter to turn to friends who are engaged in illegal and gang activities. These males and their performance of masculinity become a model of manhood for Dexter; as Michael A. Bucknor clarifies, “Jamaican masculinity is a matter of social construction and not biological determination” (1). Dexter begins to conform to the models he sees, and he acknowledges that his “life start split in two—the daytime and the night-time. The schoolboy and the big man” (McCaulay, Dog-Heart 178). It appears that Dexter comes to equate manhood, money, and power with criminal activity, and to the detriment of many, Dexter becomes caught up with people who embody this view. In an interview, McCaulay comments on Dexter’s downward spiral: “Who has money in an inner-city community? The local don or somebody who’s selling drugs or another illegal activity. In the case of this novel, it’s somebody who’s doing illegal sand mining” (“Uptown and Downtown” 98). From this point where Dexter becomes involved in illegal activity, his life begins to go down a dark road, as he and his associates are eventually caught by the police and put in jail. Another casualty is Marlon, Dexter’s younger brother, who is caught in the crossfire when the police raid their home in search of Dexter. 84

Ultimately, McCaulay’s Dog-Heart uses a cross-class relationship trope to express the fact that the mere existence of international human rights law does not guarantee the protection of human rights, and she thus adds a literary approach to discussions that interrogate the effectiveness of human rights treaties. McCaulay’s fictive account of contemporary life for some communities in Jamaica reveals ways in which some rights outlined in the ICESCR are disregarded. The result of inadequate employment opportunities and other circumstances is that some people’s basic necessities are not met. McCaulay’s narrative enlightens readers to the fact that Dexter faces critical circumstances, including sometimes not having enough to eat, which will not be solved by simply attending school in uptown. In fact, Dexter thinks, “Miss Sahara think she can make us into uptown children. She think if we learn how to read and count, learn how to behave, get expose to opportunity—she always talkin about opportunity—make uptown friend, then we will be like uptown people. I sure it not going go like that” (118; emphasis in original). Dexter cannot imagine how attending school will help him have a better life because it does not provide the immediate results, such as adequate housing and food, which he needs and desires. Thus, a disconnect exists between Sahara and Dexter concerning his needs and the avenue to have them met. Yet beyond their relationship looms portrayals of pressing national circumstances that are tangibly affected by the ever-changing global community. While the narrative suggests that an alternative approach to guarding human rights is necessary, it does not present that approach, thus highlighting the continued need for multidisciplinary perspectives on the human rights enterprise. Harrison makes, perhaps, one of the most chilling statements concerning the conditions in contemporary Jamaica when she writes, “Jamaica’s debt crisis, the IMF’s imposition of a structural adjustment policy climate, and export driven pattern of economic development have produced conditions of economic austerity that have resulted in a quality of life that may be worse than what enslaved people faced two hundred years ago” (“Everyday Neoliberalism” 6). It is troubling, to say the least, that contemporary conditions could rival those under the institution of slavery. In the end, McCaulay’s Dog-Heart promotes deeper understanding of the limited role of human rights treaties in alleviating substandard conditions and evokes the real-life human rights concerns that Jamaica and many other nations in the Global South are facing.

Notes

1 The trope of the “two Jamaicas” has an extensive history with broad significance, and it has been used to mean divisions along racial as well as class axes. See Philip Curtin’s Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830-1865, for more on the subject. In this article, the use of “two Jamaicas” refers to the reality that the lived class experiences in uptown and downtown areas are so different that it is as if these spaces are two different nations. McCaulay explains in an interview that she wanted to write about a collision between the two, although she is aware this is an oversimplification (“Uptown and Downtown” 95). See Gina A. Ulysse, Downtown Ladies (162–65) for more on socioeconomic uptown/downtown divisions in Kingston. Additionally, McCaulay uses the term “inner-city” to describe those in downtown communities or members of the working classes (“Uptown and Downtown” 96); thus, I use that term throughout this article.

2 Some other novels with this trope include Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running, Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King and Olive Senior’s Dancing Lessons. 85

3 The cross-class relationship trope is distinct from narrative structure, although it is related to McCaulay’s narrative structure in this particular novel, as Dog-Heart alternates between the two protagonists who are from different class backgrounds.

4 The novel’s low sales may be one reason for the lack of scholarship. While the novel created favourable interest among locals, it did not sell many copies and its popularity did not translate internationally (Scafe 217).

5 Harrison notes, “Many advocates and researchers argue that human rights appear to be in increased jeopardy under the conditions of globalization, especially the neoliberal form dominant today” (“Introduction” 11). In discussing the effects of globalization, Brysk asserts that “different elements and levels of globalization may produce distinct elements of empowerment, exploitation, and evolution” (7).

6 Alison Donnell also discusses how “literature in the Caribbean has been a vital mode of re-describing received reality” (422). Glyne Griffith, moreover, discusses literature and its possibilities for changing the world (290–91).

7 McClennen and Moore discuss “the centrality of literary expression as a key part of human rights advocacy” (10). They also note that “starting in the 1970s, there was clear and direct attention to the connections among human rights, literature, and personal stories, as well as to the ways in which these connections emerge out of geopolitical contexts. Following that, we note that by the 1990s, the production of life narratives—especially memoirs — had become a central, if not ubiquitous, feature of human rights campaigns” (10).

8 Human rights are outlined in the International Bill of Human Rights, which consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). These documents were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly after the devastation of World War II. The latter covenant, the ICESCR, is under discussion in this essay; the essay’s focus is primarily on Article 11, which delineates “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions,” and Articles 6 and 7, which discuss the right to work. Unless otherwise noted, the ICESCR is the covenant being referenced in this essay.

9 See Eric A. Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law; Oona A. Hathaway, “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” and Daniel Hill, “Estimating the Effects of Human Rights Treaties on State Behavior” for more on the effectiveness of legislating human rights.

10 Other scholars have examined class within Caribbean societies, including Gordon K. Lewis in Gordon K. Lewis on Race, Class and Ideology in the Caribbean. 86

11 Dexter describes Sahara as a “browning,” a lighter-skinned woman. Several scholars note that the browning is the ideal woman of beauty in Jamaica. For instance, Patricia Mohammed discusses “the ‘browning’ who represents the ‘uptown’ middle-class ideal woman of mixed race” and that “the origin of this ideal [comes] from the ‘mulatto’ woman bred in slavery” (26–27).

12 The General Comments by the CESCR are documents that expound on and clarify parts of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

13 A Jamaica Public Service (JPS) news article, “JPS Reduces Service to Communities With High Levels Of Theft, Says It Has Tried Everything,” published on May 12, 2014, states: “In 2013, JPS removed over 197,000 illegal lines, carried out more than 113,000 account audits and meter investigations, and facilitated the arrest of more than 1200 persons for theft of electricity.” JPS is implementing several initiatives to halt electricity theft.

14 In recent times, Jamaica has experienced an increase in darker-skinned citizens bleaching their skin, and the government is trying to stop the sale of illegal bleaching products, according to the Ministry of Health. Some believe that lighter skin—gained by artificial products lightening (and, unfortunately, damaging) their skin—will provide access to things they feel are closed to them as dark-skinned people, including employment. However, there are not always easy class/colour distinctions in the novel or in real life. Sahara’s successful friend Lydia, the restaurant owner, is black, and so is the principal of Dexter’s school. Dexter explains, “Uptown people can be black, brown, white, chiney, coolie or syrian” (14). A considerable body of Caribbean scholarship theorizes class and colour in Jamaica (e.g., see Ulysse, Downtown Ladies.

15 Michaeline A. Crichlow discusses Project Land Lease in Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development.

16 Documentaries such as Life and Debt and Jamaica for Sale highlight the predicament.

17 Scholte further explains that globalization has caused changes in already existing inequalities in nations around the world (322–23), while Thorin also claims that the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization ignore pre-existing inequalities (14).

18 Also, Ian G. Strachan’s documentary, I’s Man: Manhood in , explores manhood and crime in the contemporary period.

19 This leads to discussion of another human rights issue emerging during the contemporary era of globalization—police violence. Dexter’s community is overrun by crime (committed by dons and police), and he describes often having to hide under the bed to escape stray bullets. This issue is addressed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which outlines the obligation of law enforcement officials to respect the human rights of all people. 87

Works Cited

Allen-Agostini, Lisa. “Suffer the Children.” Review of Dog-Heart, by Diana McCaulay, Caribbean Review of Books, 24 Nov. 2010, caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/24-november-2010/suffer-the- children/. Accessed 9 June 2011.

Barriteau, Violet Eudine. “Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean.” Feminist Review, vol. 59, no. 1, 1998, pp. 186–210, doi:10.1080/014177898339523.

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Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. “Gendering Human Rights and Their Violation: A Reading of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Routledge, 2016, pp. 60–68.

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Harrison, Faye V. “Everyday Neoliberalism, Diminishing Subsistence Security, and the Criminalization of Survival: Gendered Urban Poverty in Three African Diaspora Contexts.” IUAES Inter Congress on Mega Urbanization, Multi-Ethnic Society, Human Rights, and Development. Kolkata, India, 12–15 Dec. 2004. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/256442077_ Everyday_Neoliberalism_Diminishing_Subsistence_Security_and_the_Criminalization_of_ Survival_Gendered_Urban_Poverty_in_Three_African_Diaspora_Contexts. Accessed 11 Feb. 2014.

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I’s Man: Manhood in the Bahamas. Directed and produced by Ian G. Strachan. Marble Head Films, 2013.

Jamaica for Sale. Written and produced by Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaulay, directed by Esther Figueroa, Vagabond Media & Jamaica Environment Trust, 2008.

“JPS Reduces Service to Communities With High Levels Of Theft, Says It Has Tried Everything.” jamaica-gleaner.com/power/52828. 12 May 2014.

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Lewis, Gordon K. Gordon K. Lewis on Race, Class, and Ideology in the Caribbean, edited by Anthony P. Maingot. Ian Randle, 2010.

Life and Debt. Directed and produced by Stephanie Black, and narration written by Jamaica Kincaid. Tuff Gong Pictures, 2001.

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Book Reviews 93

Book Reviews

Beyond Calypso: Re- reading Samuel Selvon. Edited by Malachi McIntosh Ian Randle P, 2016, ISBN 978-976-637-861-5.

Simone A. James Alexander

In Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon, Malachi McIntosh argues that although renowned Trinidad-born writer Samuel Selvon has authored work in multiple genres, including novels, screenplays, poems, and radio plays, the full extent of his work remains relatively unknown. McIntosh credits the few critics who “rescued Selvon’s work from the neglect it suffered toward the end of his writing life” (xi); and whose vigilance not only manifested in the publication of essay collections and book chapters, and the reissuing of several of his texts, but also in his being named the “father of Black Literature” (xii). However, McIntosh calls out critics for having an “abiding scholarly fixation on [Selvon’s] debt to calypso” (xii). This fixation, he argues, has resulted in a preponderance of critical attention given to Selvon’s two novels, The Lonely Londoners and A Brighter Sun, while other important works have been neglected. Although McIntosh concedes that “calypso- inspired analyses have provided some insights into Selvon’s” creativity (xii), he questions, even challenges, some critics’ dismissal and short-sightedness, noting their tendency to engender a kind of uniform approach to Selvon’s work, while dismissing its multicultural, transnational impact and influence. Calling on scholars to adopt a more peripheral vision in their assessment of Selvon’s writing, McIntosh and fellow Selvon scholars set out, in Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon, to address this blind spot, tasking themselves with rescuing Samuel Selvon from oblivion and providing a more balanced reading of his lesser-known works. In exploring the “other” Selvons located in these less-studied texts, the contributors in this collection, while not evidencing “a strong desire to abandon ‘calypso,’” aim to provide a more-sustained and analytical assessment of Selvon’s mid-career novels, I Hear Thunder and Turn Again Tiger, his later novels, The Housing Lark, The Plains of Caroni, and Moses Migrating, 94 and his radio plays and poems (xv). Along similar lines, the collection expands on themes such as the representation of women’s voices (both Caribbean and English), masculinity, humour, creolization, religion, and mixed community, as well as a critique of post-federation Trinidad (xv). This first full-length collection of essays on Selvon is exclusively dedicated to celebrating Selvon: the man, the critic, the author. It is comprised of an introduction, an afterword and eleven essays, all culled from a conference entitled “Beyond Calypso: New Perspectives on Samuel Selvon,” hosted by the University of Warwick on July 2, 2011. One of the themes in Selvon’s fiction, that of women being given voice, strongly resonates in this collection as the voices of female critics dominate, outnumbering male critics by a ratio of seven to four. It is noteworthy, however, that even as McIntosh calls for a balancing of the critique of Selvon’s work, the majority of the contributors to Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon hail from the United Kingdom. Establishing that there are “other Selvons” to be unearthed in Selvon’s body of work, critic Kenneth Ramchand’s essay argues for (portraying) a radically different Selvon than the one we know (1). Even as he calls attention to Selvon’s subsequent transformation and growth as a writer, Ramchand argues that “other Selvons” resided in “the Early Selvons”: the poems and early prose pieces (6). Ramchand posits that Selvon’s transformation from poet and short story writer to novelist has witnessed the “stretch[ing] and complicat[ion] of the form of the conventional novel” (6). This reconfiguration of the conventional novel is no easy feat, a fact that Ramchand underscores in his thesis that Selvon “stands with Wilson Harris among the innovators” (6). In her essay, Vahni Capildeo calls out “cultural purists” who narrowly focus on insignificant details, such as inaccuracies and anomalies in A Brighter Sun, in an attempt to question Selvon’s authenticity and representation. She counters that fixation on such minutia can allow readers to “lose access to the fiction’s pleasure” (14). She opines that the critics who disapproved of Selvon’s brand of creolization, which is not focused “on urbanization or the erasure of Hinduism, Sikhism or Islam,” have overlooked the fact that “Selvon’s levelling was an artistic device to cover his own remoteness from non-Christian, non-urban material” (15). Further addressing the over-politicization and over-simplification of Selvon’s fiction, Lewis MacLeod in his essay, “A Brighter Sun: ‘I Still Want to See How the Story Unfolds’—Conversations with a Novel,” registers his objection to Wayne Brown’s claim that “the essential impulse propelling [Selvon’s] fiction was the search for God” (quoted in McIntosh 21). Intimating that such assertions contribute to the distortion and reductive assessment of Selvon and his work, MacLeod expresses disgust with “‘progressive’ strains in postcolonial discourse” that engage in the “kidnap[ping] of certain sections of [Selvon’s] work and forc[ing] them into ill-fitting analytical frameworks aligned with particular political projects” (21). Moreover, he suggests that examining Selvon through the framework of “discourses of masculinity” might provide a more inclusive, critical platform, resulting in “new and productive ways” to reach, read and understand Selvon (21). Indeed, for MacLeod, Selvon’s search for God runs parallel with the “quest for masculine legitimacy ... through the notions of God the Father, or, alternately, the Father as God in his fiction” (21). This conflation, MacLeod argues, is evidenced in Turn Again Tiger and Those Who Eat the Cascadura, novels that have a strong presence of family life with patriarchs at the helm. At the same time, the rule of the father, or hegemonic masculinity, is contested by an “emerging” femininity, ironically (partially) realized through Selvon’s obsession with manhood and masculinity. 95

In her essay “The Island and the World: Kinship, Friendship and Living Together in Selected Writings of Sam Selvon,” Alison Donnell explores how Selvon engenders transnational unity and community in his writing by focusing on “the relationships between neighbors, friends, and lovers, rather than the kinship relations of family” (39). This “living together alongside and in difference” that is comprised of “elected rather than actual families,” and that embraces the “idea of interaction and kinship across difference” strongly resonates with Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community. As exemplified by the title of Donnell’s essay, “The Island and the World,” which itself invokes the title of Selvon’s 1955 novel, An Island Is a World, this sense of community and kinship is not deterred or disrupted by geographical distance. Donnell emphasizes that the cohesion and solidarity of Selvon’s community is “based on models of historical continuity and inheritance” (39). This community not only bridges geographical distance, but also functions as a balm for emotional distance, ameliorating the loneliness and estrangement of migration and migratory experiences. This cross-cultural alliance engenders creolization, and, according to Donnell, finds representation in the calypso form (portrayed in The Lonely Londoners and The Housing Lark) that fosters “companionable spaces in the often inhospitable mother country and allow[s] the multiple registers of dream, of struggle, of community and of performed success to be heard in a chorus of living that, although not always harmonious, unforgettably creolized the sound of London” (52). Donnell’s attention to the shadow looming over Selvon’s novels, caused by the rise and fall of the West Indian Federation, resonates with Anderson’s idea of the community that is imagined as “both inherently limited and sovereign” (15). Indeed, this imagined community is rendered most palpable by Selvon’s affinity with this political union; as Donnell informs us, Selvon travelled to London during the rise and the collapse of the Federation (40). Denise deCaires Narain pointedly challenges Stefano Harney’s masculinist reading of Samuel Selvon in his book Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. She takes particular issue with the subtle dismissal of The Brighter Sun as non-subversive in its treatment of creolization when compared to The Lonely Londoners. Critical of Harney’s distinction or division between “the inevitable creolization of Trinidad” and an “actively ‘predatory’ creolization in London” that is underscored by self-consciousness and rebellion, Narain is troubled by Harney’s lopsided analogy, wherein he too easily posits black Caribbean men as “archetypally subversive figures” (53). She goes on to argue that creolization’s “inevitability in Trinidad is also more troubled than Harney implies” (54). Narain instead argues that Brighter Sun “foregrounds the place of Indo-Trinidadians in creolization” and furthermore offers a “more complicated and contradictory idea of creolization, one less easily reconciled with creolization-as-resistance” (54). Furthering the discourse that critics such as Brinda Mehta have advanced, Narain re- emphasizes the idea that the original definition of creolization is limiting as it gives voice to the African- European encounter as the “primary binary,” while excluding other groups, including the original inhabitants of the Caribbean (55). In a similar vein, she argues against the secondary position that “the dominant Afro-Creole paradigm” accords to Indian cultural practices (56). Restating her call and the need for a balanced and careful assessment of Selvon’s novel, she offers a comparative reading of Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea (2005) and Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie (2012). Not only does this analysis bring to light Indo-Trinidadians’ involvement in creole culture, but her choice in pairing the two Trinidadian writers—one Indo-Caribbean and female, who has lived in several cosmopolitan cities, and the other Afro-Caribbean and male, whose ties to his homeland of Trinidad remain unbroken— engenders creolization. 96

Expanding the discourse on the community/nation as both “limited and sovereign,” Lorna Burns, in her analysis of Selvon’s novels An Island Is a World (1955) and I Hear Thunder (1963), draws attention to the diametrically different positions that the texts assume in relation to the short-lived political union of the West Indian Federation. She reasons that An Island Is a World is aspirational in its efforts to engender “inter-island cooperation and Caribbean unity” (77). In contrast,I Hear Thunder registers Selvon’s disappointment “at the way in which ‘the dream of Federation had evaporated’” (77). In I Hear Thunder, creolization in the form of interracial relations is posited as a way to bridge differences and maintain cross-cultural alliances; however, it fails in its efforts to produce the desired unions. Burns argues that parochialism also functions as a barrier to integration, resulting in the region’s “inability to move beyond a nationalist agenda” (77). Ultimately, Selvon’s optimism for transnational unity is dimmed by the national angst and unease experienced in Trinidad. Illuminating Selvon’s problematic relationship with femininity, which lacks full realization in the regional novels, Kate Houlden explores the racialized portrayal of women in Turn Again Tiger (1959), I Hear Thunder (1963) and the Plains of Caroni (1970). Even as it appears that the white female body is used to expunge the “fantasy of European superiority” (85), the novels, each of which focuses on an Indo- Caribbean man engaged in sexual intercourse with a white woman, promote a preference for whiteness. This predilection for whiteness comes at the expense of black women, as Houlden is quick to point out. She argues that these novels promote a “move towards whiteness, as the protagonists’ choices of long- term partners progress chronologically from submissive young Indian wife, to creolized Indian girlfriend to educated white Caribbean woman” (85). This engagement with a regional creolized identity engenders a reordering of the hierarchy by “making Indo-Caribbean and white Trinidadians equal,” and in Houlden’s summation, it maintains “Afro-Caribbean subordination” (86). While Selvon’s attempt to overturn “gendered and sexual legacies of colonialism as experienced by Indo and white Caribbean heritage” is noteworthy, Houlden insists that this intervention comes at the expense of black women as they “appear to be excluded from this process” (85). Turn Again Tiger reinforces the iconic images of the Jezebel figure (the sexualized black woman) or the Mammy figure (the maternal asexual woman), and black women have minimal presence in the other two novels. Grounded in the romance fiction genre, the men, according to Houlden, are rewarded for their travails as they are reunited with their Indian partners “after an excursion through white flesh” (84). Houlden argues that the “new” nation, defined by the heterosexual family, is problematic as it resonates with the heteropatriarchal order wherein women are docile, are performed upon and lack sexual agency. Furthermore, women remain in service to men, and to the nation via their subordination to men. In a similar vein, the denial of black claims to citizenship is problematic, Houlden points out: “[T]his exclusion of black women forms a troubling lacuna in Selvon’s regional novels” (100). Whereas the sexual relations function as a site for possible (future) reconciliation between white and Indo-Caribbean women (and men), the relationship between the Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean population is not accorded equal critical attention. Despite claims by Selvon’s friends, including Austin Clarke, that he was politically uncommitted, J. Vijay Maharaj in her chapter “Cascadura Lovesongs: Displacing Indo-, Afro- and Other-centricities in Selvon’s Romance,” insists that Selvon was revolutionary, particularly in his representation of the oral tradition. For Maharaj, it is this seamless engagement with the creole continuum that earned Selvon the appellation of “calypsonian” (103). Drawing on Gordon Rohlehr’s definition of the calypsonian as a communicator of “living folklore,” Maharaj demonstrates that the themes “about life, sex, love, colonial labor, violence and world issues” that Selvon discusses in Those Who Eat the Cascadura are the very themes 97 with which calypsonians were preoccupied (103). Cascadura “problematizes dominant national Creole discourses and centers the syncretism of obeah as well as ‘popular’ Hindu practices while troubling ‘official’ Hinduism” (105). Selvon is attentive to the local culture, to the Trinidadian dialect; he was ridiculed for subverting the so-called standard language as some critics not only dubbed his work untranslatable, but also commented on its “profound localness” (102). Cascadura furthers the process of creolization, exemplified through the fusion (co-existence) of Afrocentricity and Hinduism, allowing what Maharaj, quoting David Dabydeen, refers to as “a continuum of slave and indenture experience” (115). Selvon’s foundational black British film, Pressure, written during the height of race consciousness in Britain, is the result of a collaborative effort: co-authored and co-directed with filmmaker and Black Power activist, Horace Ové, it was one of two texts culled from “an original script, The Immigrant” (120). In his essay “English Brother or Not ...” Joseph Jackson argues that Ové’s activism, his direct participation in the Black Power Movement in Britain, stands in stark contrast to the political stance Selvon assumes in his London novels’ treatment of “black consciousness and political organization with a degree of ambivalence or skepticism that can also be traced” in Pressure (127). Deliberating on how black political activists have awakened the state and brought it to a heightened state of consciousness, Jackson, in registering racial discontentment through activism and demonstrations, signals Selvon’s “moderate stance on an explicit black politics,” thus lending credibility to the earlier claim that Selvon is politically uncommitted (125). In “‘Playing Mas Isn’t Playing the Ass’: Moses Migrating as ‘Farce en Noir,’” McIntosh pens an apt final culminating chapter in this collection that celebrates Selvon’s life and work. McIntosh argues that “in many ways, the conclusion of [Selvon’s final novel]Moses Migrating is a fitting finale for Selvon’s literary career” (136). Like Selvon, the titular protagonist Moses Aloetta migrates to Britain and subsequently returns home, seemingly not belonging fully to either of those places, existing as a consummate outsider, “asserting a right to belong and requesting equal treatment, but having both things denied” (136). A recurring character, Moses Aloetta appears in the trilogy that includes The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending and Moses Migrating; he exemplifies Selvon’s continued preoccupation with the quest for citizenship and the demand for recognition and acceptance by the Mother/country. Stripped of his British citizenship “in the wake of Trinidadian independence,” Moses’s outsider status is accentuated despite the fact that he has resided in Britain for more than two decades (136). In McIntosh’s summation, the uncertainty of the Moses character in this novel lends itself to the critical reception, or lack thereof, of the novel. Many critics, including Roydon Salick, Kenneth Ramchand and Jeremy Poynting, have characterized it as “entertainment,” a lesser sequel, “if not an outright failure” (138–39). However, McIntosh insists that this negative reception most likely stems from the difficult form of the novel. He suggests that if we re-examine Moses Migrating on its own terms, “we can discover within its play the serious core that sits at the center of its performances” (140). The hybrid nature of the novel lends itself to Moses’s liminality: his appropriation of a British identity “to fit into a Britishness that equals whiteness” and his embrace of a Trinidadianness that contributes to his unbelonging (148). The afterword by Susheila Nasta serves as a fitting final tribute, or an obituary to her friend, Sam, as she affectionately calls him. This posthumous tribute finds further expression in the surge of “international interest in his works,” as Selvon is recognized as “one of the most important Caribbean and British writers of his generation” (150–51). The call by critics for a deeper exploration and re- examination of Selvon’s work arguably has been answered. Nasta opines that many contemporary 98 scholars are reading his work through a broader lens, “locating him as one of the key writers to creolize the post-war metropole and a writer who was to challenge the once tightly guarded interface between metropolitan and colonial modernisms” (151). Selvon’s coronation as the “‘father of Black British writing’ is not only timely, but long overdue” (153). There is no denying Selvon’s transnational impact, even as his work continues to defy categories and resist easy classification. His continued advocacy for transnationalism and flexible citizenship renders him a “true” citizen of the world. Whereas the title of the collection intimates that Selvon is Beyond Calypso, the rhythms and beats manifested in the timely and belated tributes of the contributors of this collection are insistent, engendering a repeat, a return to Selvon’s impressive and wide-ranging body of work. The calypso-style narration bonds an imagined community comprised of critics, scholars and friends of the erudite Trinidad-born writer, Samuel Selvon.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.

Harney, Stefano. Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. Zed, 2006. 99

Book Reviews

Glyne A. Griffith, The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-32118-9. Hardcover: ISBN 978-3-319-32117-2; ebook: ISBN 978-3-319- 32118-9 Cornel Bogle

In The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958, Glyne Griffith explores the history of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program and offers an engrossing narrative of its influence in shaping not only the cultural life of the Caribbean, but also the political aspirations of Caribbean people. A rich archival project, this book does significant work in consulting a variety of sources ranging from letters and radio broadcast scripts to personal interviews. Griffith, in bringing these sources together, offers a compelling account of the role of the BBC-broadcasted Caribbean Voices program in the building of West Indian literary communities. He goes on to show that Caribbean Voices was instrumental in facilitating the publication and aesthetic development of many of the region’s canonical authors, such as Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Griffith argues that these writers came to depend on theCaribbean Voices program not only as a means of sharing their work with their publics, but also as a medium through which articulations of postcolonial livelihoods could be actively voiced, on the BBC of all places. At the centre of The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958, is a critical, yet sensitive, examination of the tenure of the program’s longest serving editor, Henry Swanzy. Following on his assertion that the “order of things in the context of colonial and even post-colonial formulations is often a calculus established in irony” (17), Griffith positions the Anglo-Irish Swanzy as a central figure in the 100 development of Anglophone Caribbean literature. He depicts Swanzy as a man deeply committed to decolonization and conscious of his positionality, and reveals the editor’s ability to be influential without being paternalistic. Griffith argues that the success of theCaribbean Voices program was due in large part to changes made by Swanzy during his tenure. Much of the book focuses on crafting a sympathetic portrait of Swanzy as a keen facilitator of the emerging literatures of the Caribbean, whether it be through the epistolary community of Caribbean writers that he actively participated in and encouraged, or through his shaping of the aesthetics of Caribbean literature of the period. Through the Caribbean Voices’ critics’ circle, Swanzy created a space for insightful commentary on the literature broadcasted on the program. In his final chapter, Griffith moves beyond his focus on Swanzy, and repositions Caribbean Voices as his central subject as he documents the editorial transition of the program from Swanzy to the impactful reigns of a young V.S. Naipaul (1955–1956) and finally Edgar Mittelholzer (1956–1958). The most absorbing argument offered by Griffith is found in his assertion in the third chapter, “Caribbean Voices and Competing Visions of Post-Colonial Community,” that the Caribbean Voices program contributed to the disavowal of regional federalist politics in favour of territorial nationalist constructions of identity, governance and futurity. Citing the editorial preferences of the program, Griffith suggests that Henry Swanzy’s appeal for Caribbean literature that reflected a local colour, with the constituent elements of local dialect, landscape and a focus on the precarious livelihoods of pre-independence working-class subjects, among others, fostered a “vision of regional community as fundamentally peasant and working class” that helped subvert the middle-class political aspirations of “a future post-colonial community that was closely aligned with the federal imagining of decolonization” (72). Though Griffith’s argument is compelling and well-reasoned, there are moments when it is not entirely convincing in positioning the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program, and the literary and cultural productions that emerged during the period, as a force that was effective in shaping the political subjectivities of Caribbean listeners on such a large scale. In fact, the documentation of the audience’s engagement is often anecdotal or insufficiently corroborated. This is not an indictment of Griffith’s offering. Rather, it reflects the lack of scholarship in the field, particularly the lack of archival engagement that could have made more explicit the impact of the program on the political decisions undertaken by the region’s citizens. If the chapter feels at moments to be inconclusive, this is very much due to the limitations of the archives consulted and not a result of Griffith’s commentary. Indeed, Griffith simultaneously engages in the work of inviting new scholarship whilst enacting his own scholarly production. This posture of encouraging scholarship is central to much of The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958 as Griffith acknowledges and asserts that engagement with the archive cannot be static, but rather is “ongoing and necessary if scholars are to grasp…. the synchronic textual contours” (168) of Caribbean and postcolonial literatures. Griffith’s book is in concert with recent publications that have demonstrated critical investments in expanding the existent narratives about the development of the region’s literature. Indeed, researchers in Caribbean literary history will find J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg’s edited collection of essays, Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature, a compelling companion to The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, one that undertakes more contextualizing work and considers the multiplicity of activity among writers of the period, as well as the communities and networks they sought to establish. Griffith’s recovery of influential yet often forgotten figures in the development of Caribbean literature, particularly Henry Swanzy, is reflective of a rise in reparative historicizing as a mode of scholarship in Caribbean literary studies. This is 101 demonstrated by Alison Donnell’s recently edited collections of the work of Una Marson and Michael Bucknor’s recent publications on Austin Clarke, to name a few. Furthermore, Griffith’s The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943–1958 emerges at a moment in West Indian literary studies when the intersection of media (particularly radio) and the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature has been given increased scholarly attention. Though it asserts itself as literary history, in its examination of radio’s effect on literary productions in the Caribbean, the text aptly manoeuvres through the realm of media history and its shaping of both the form and content of the region’s writing. This turn in scholarship to view media productions and literary history as deeply intertwined is shared by scholars in the field, as recent publications such as Alejandra Bronfman’s Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean aptly demonstrate. The liveliness of research on the period of early Anglophone Caribbean literature strongly reflects the fact that the region’s archives are still rich with material that researchers continue to find engaging. As Griffith tells us in his introductory notes, the publication of The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 has long been in the making. Not only is it the result of over two decades of archival work, but it is also the painstaking reassembly of much earlier research for this book—documentation that was destroyed in a fire at Griffith’s home. This book is certainly an important one, a history that has finally found its way to the surface. In its positioning of relationships, networks and affiliations as pivotal to the development of Caribbean literature in the mid-twentieth century, The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 offers insight into the possibilities for creative production and organizing in the contemporary moment. While it will largely be taken up by scholars with interest in Caribbean literature and media studies, as it should be, the book could also be beneficial to a larger audience of readers and writers of Caribbean literature in promoting a greater understanding of the importance and necessary urgency of facilitating new networks and communities in the region and its diasporas, in order to continue the work of developing Caribbean literature and wider cultural practices.

Works Cited Bronfman, Alejandra. Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean. U of North Carolina P, 2016.

Brown, J. Dillon, and Leah Reade Rosenberg, editors. Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2015.

Bucknor, Michael A. “Austin Clarke, Affective Affiliations, and the Cross-Border Poetics of Caribbean Canadian Writing.” Beyond ‘Understanding Canada’: Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Literature, edited by Melissa Tanti, Jeremy Haynes, Daniel Coleman and Lorraine York. U of Alberta P, 2017, pp. 51-77.

Donnell, Alison, editor. Pocomania and London Calling. Blouse and Skirt Books and National Library of Jamaica, 2016.

---, editor. Una Marson: Selected Poems. Peepal Tree P, 2011. 102

Notes on Contributors

Ronald Cummings is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Brock University in Canada. He teaches and researches postcolonial and queer literatures.

Nalini Mohabir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. Her teaching and research interests focus on postcolonial and feminist geographies.

Suzanne C. Persard is a Jamaican-American scholar, activist and writer, born and raised in Bronx, New York to parents from Kingston, Jamaica. A founding member of Jahajee Sisters, the first organization in the U.S. committed to ending gender-based violence in Indo-Caribbean communities, she was profiled by the Smithsonian for her writing and activism in 2014. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in Slate and The Huffington Post, as well as in anthologies in the U.S. and India. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University in women’s, gender and sexuality studies. Her research investigates gender and sexuality within postcolonial diasporas and the ways in which empire produces and problematizes formations of citizenship.

Tuli Chatterji is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York. Her teaching and research interests include Caribbean literature, South Asian literatures, postcolonial theory, feminist studies, and composition. Her essay on Indo-Caribbean women’s writing has been published in Indo- Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016). Her current research examines postcolonial literary representations of fetishes in Caribbean and South Asian literature.

Candice A. Pitts is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Belize and an elected member of the Belize City Council. Dr. Pitts received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Howard University, her M.A. in English Literature from The Ohio State University, and her B.A. in English Literature from Albany State University. She has published scholarly articles in Wasafiri, The College Language Association Journal and in International Research and Review. Dr. Pitts has also presented her research at numerous academic and scholarly conferences globally. Her research interests include Caribbean, postcolonial, African diaspora, Belizean, and cultural studies. 103

Robin Brooks is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Africana Studies. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first century literature, particularly African-American, Caribbean, African, and American multiethnic literatures, as well as feminist theories and postcolonial studies. Dr. Brooks holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida, an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.A. in English from Florida State University. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Diego and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida.

Simone A. James Alexander is Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies at Seton Hall University. Her primary fields of research include women, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial literature, migration and diaspora studies. She is the author of the award-winning book, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (University Press of Florida, 2014; reprinted in May 2016). Professor Alexander is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press, 2001) and co-editor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (Africa World Press, 2013). Her current projects include Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions and Bodies of (In)Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationhood.

Cornel Bogle is a graduate student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is currently conducting research on the various intersections of transnational literature, critical race theory, diaspora studies, genre theory, and black studies. He is particularly interested in Caribbean and African diasporic literatures and cultures, as well as phenomenological approaches to reading. 104